Creating a strong brand is about a lot more than a creating a clever logo. One of the perks of having Ellipses on your team from the beginning is that we can assist you with the brand creation process of your restaurant or business. We partner with incredibly talented folks who can bring your vision to life and can help guide you through the process. For a guest blog post about the creation of a brand, we needed to look no further than our remarkably talented friends at Oakland-based Chen Design Associates, who reimagined not only Ellipses’ branding, but created the brand identities for our former clients, ChefsGiving and Wydown Hotel. Read more about the importance of creating a strong brand by Chen Design’s Brand Experience Director, Hannah Robinson DeMoss.
We all know that feeling, that touch of surprise and delight when you stumble upon a new brand that just gets it right. Or maybe it’s a brand you’ve been following for years and now it offers something new, something unexpected but truly wonderful. What is it, exactly that creates that surprise and delight? Well, it’s not just a wordmark or a singular product. It’s something much bigger.
Imagine you’re scrolling through a friend’s feed on Instagram and discover a new gelateria in your neighborhood. Something about the way they’ve shot the photo and written the caption piques your curiosity, so you decide to swing by their shop. If the brand is thoughtfully designed, as you step into the shop, you should be immersed in a full sensory experience that serves up different angles of the brand’s personality—the visual signage cues that invite you indoors, the smells that greet you when you open the door, the sounds you hear while waiting in line, the tone of voice employees use when taking your order, the flavors you taste when you take your first bite, all the way down to way the packaging feels in your hand when you walk out of the store.
At Chen Design Associates, we believe the process of discovering the brand’s narrative starts not with a logo, but with a deep dive into brand strategy—uncovering insights from the market and competitive landscapes. Using this foundation for the brand can help to define the intrinsic purpose behind why it exists, how to position it in the marketplace and determine what values should define the brand’s personality—what it looks like, what it sounds like, and the feeling you get when you’re around it. By creating a visual identity system and a narrative that ladders back to strategy, the brand and its story takes on more purpose and meaning for customers.
A strong brand experience is key to a company’s success as it drives more brand recognition, customer loyalty and repeat business. Understanding and defining key parts of the user journey can help ensure that all the different moments in which customers come in contact with your brand are purposefully designed to meet their needs. Breaking out the user journey into key moments—Awareness, Consideration, Acquisition, Service and Loyalty—can help your business be creative about the channels that are used to connect with new or existing customers, while sensory cues can be layered into the experience to engage with them at a deeper level. Being intentional and thoughtful about how you design touchpoints can also help to differentiate your brand in the marketplace. The more holistically considered the touchpoints, the more reasons for customers to return, re-engage and ultimately fall in love with your brand.
At Chen Design Associates we are most successful when we can create fully immersive and holistic experiences for brands. The branding we developed for Craftsman and Wolves, Wydown Hotel and ChefsGiving projects highlight some of the thoughtful work we have created in the food and hospitality industries.
Patisserie a la mode
Unexpected, sleek, and playfully edgy, Craftsman and Wolves is a contemporary patisserie-cafe that partnered with CDA to launch its locations and develop a branding experience as thoughtfully precise as its culinary creations.
Arrive Curious. Leave Inspired.
CDA strategically reimagined every aspect of the Wydown Hotel brand and guest experience—from its brand identity to signage and materials.
Cooking for a cause
When called upon to join the Bay Area restaurant community in support of those devastated by Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino wildfires, we jumped at the chance. CDA donated time and materials to design the ChefsGiving brand identity and publicity artwork.
About Hannah Robinson DeMoss
Brand Experience Director at Chen Design Associates
Hannah applies her love of shaping meaningful brand experiences through her blended background rooted in brand strategy and visual design. After receiving her MBA in Design Strategy, she brings a high level of strategic understanding for how to leverage the experiential design process to achieve business goals. Prior to joining Chen Design, she spent the last 15 years creating thoughtful digital and environmental branding experiences for Tea Collection, Apple, Gap, Bare Minerals and Interbrand. Hannah has also directed a variety of other partnership projects ranging from experience design to packaging for the following brands: TOMS, Nat Geo Kids, Public Bikes, Stella McCartney, CFDA Fashion Fund/Vogue, SFMOMA, The Met, The North Face and Scharffen Berger Chocolate. Her work has been featured in Print, VM+SD and GDUSA magazines.