An identity rewritten twice a day

The problem

Ressac buys at the quay in the morning and writes the menu at eleven. If the afternoon boat comes back with something better, it gets rewritten at four. The identity they had could not follow: a drawn boat, a script logotype that only existed as a flattened image, and menus typed in a word processor with whatever fonts were installed on the office laptop.

By the end of a season, the room contained four generations of the same restaurant. The chalkboard said one thing, the printed menu another, the sign above the door a third. Nobody had done anything wrong. There was simply no rule anyone could follow at four in the afternoon.

What we did

One typeface, two weights, everywhere: a grotesque wide enough to hold a name at forty centimetres and a price list at nine points. A wordmark cut from that same typeface rather than drawn, so it can be reset at any size without a designer.

Then a menu that a cook can operate: a fixed grid, three text sizes, a paper stock that survives a wet hand, and a template that prints on the machine already in the office. The rules that matter fit on two cards taped inside the service cupboard. The manual, twenty pages, is for the year after we leave.

The facade was hand painted rather than printed, because the wall faces the harbour and vinyl on that wall lasts two winters.

What it changed

Producing the day’s menu went from about forty minutes to four, and it is now done by whoever is closest to the printer. The restaurant reports thirty one per cent more weekday lunch covers over the first summer, which they attribute mostly to the menu being legible from the street.

A year in, nothing has been added to the system. That is the part we are proudest of.