Transcripts
1. Introduction: What is Abi-Haus?: Hello, everyone. My name is Ryan Feerer. I'm a designer, illustrator, educator and restaurateur here in Abilene, Texas. I'm super excited about this class and hopefully we'll learn a lot about extending your brand in contexts of my restaurant, Abi-Haus, in hopes of making your brand more visible and have fun learning about logos, secondary logos, icons and design systems. So, let's get started. So, all of this began on Halloween of 2010 when Jimbo Jackson and his family stopped by my house to trick or treat. They were a young family. We were a young family, and we immediately hit it off and became great friends. We both share love for great food and mix our experiences in our previous homes, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and New York City. So, we would always get together and have cook-outs and make each other our favorite dishes. One day, Jimbo Jackson had an opportunity to get out of the Air Force and he approached me about opening up a restaurant. Thinking nothing at all would come out the idea, I said, "Sure, why not?" Because I feel like a lot of friends always have those conversations of doing these great things and they never followed through with it. Four months later, we had a restaurant. But we couldn't have done it without hiring the right people. Previously, we had no restaurant experience. We just love good food. So, it was vital that we hired the right team in order to make our dreams happen and for those dreams to continue to happen. A lot of people ask me how we came up with the name Abi-Haus, and I wanted to touch on that briefly. We knew we wanted include Abilene in our name somehow and also incorporate the names of our children. Jimbo son's name is Haustin and my daughter's name is Rose. We played with tons of options but none of them really worked out. Then, one day I remember Jimbo talking to his son saying, "Hey, Haus, come over here and help me with this thing," and it really stuck with me. Haus, H-A-U-S, being the German word for house was brilliant and it had to be incorporated into the name somehow. So, then it was, how can we attach Abilene to the name of our restaurant? It didn't feel right to have it be Abilene House. So, I did some thinking and the airport code came to me A-B-I, Abi, attached that with Haus, Abi-Haus and we add, it it felt right. A lot of people have asked us "Why are you opening up a restaurant like this in Abilene?" My answer was something like this should have existed a long time ago. Our approach to the restaurant and the reasons why we wanted to start it were kind of selfish. We wanted to have these amazing foods that we missed from our previous homes, and we just can't find that here. Here's a ton of amazing Tex-Mex and barbecue but anything other than that, you have to drive three and a half hours to Dallas or Austin to have that experience. I only wanted to create great food and amazing drink but also do it the right way, preparing foods well. We make a lot of things from scratch, from our breads to our sauces, our brines for pickles. Even on the bar side, I mean, we make a lot of our mixes from scratch. We believe that food should be made beautifully and done right. It's a craft, and it's an art, and we try to approach everything within the restaurant the same way. I think it's really paid off. We wanted to create an escape for the Abilenians here in town. We wanted to transport them to a different place and I feel like we've accomplished that really well with the help of professionals like our executive chef, Kyle Clemmer, and our bar manager, Drew Garison, and the help of Dana Tanamachi and Jeff Rogers, who absolutely rocked the interior space. We've had a lot of exposure because of the design of the restaurant from the exteriors to the interiors and because of all the collateral like the menu and everything. So, we've been very fortunate to have come this far and we're excited to see what happens next.
2. Developing the Logo: All right everybody, let's get down to it. Right now we're going to talk about the logo. We're going to analyze the Abi-Haus logo and have a brief overview of the creation process. What I want you guys to do is to choose a logo mark you previously created, or develop a new one. This should have a typographic solution but can also be paired with an icon. What you see on the screen right now, is a whole bunch of random sketches from icons to senior-like letter forms, to really rough on campusing like a logo mark layouts, as you can see right here, right here, right here, and again, these are super tiny but these are starting points for me. I have a basic idea of what I want in my mind, and then I go to town and start to create a custom type for these layouts. As you can see here, I've already started to develop some kind of a language of visual language, using scripts, stencil scripts, and some other stuff. So, before I get started talking about the design process for the Abi-Haus logo, I wanted to give you guys a few words of encouragement. One thing I've noticed from my students is that they get really down on themselves when the work, the quality of the work that they produce doesn't amount up to the designers that they analyze, which is really ridiculous because they just started their career in design and they're comparing their work to professionals that have most likely dedicated their lives to design and have a lot more experience. What I'm trying to say is it's okay to suck in the very beginning, and I think you need to embrace that and to know that you're going to produce really terrible work. As long as you learn from those mistakes and you better yourself because of them, you're going to do just fine. If you're passionate about design, you really want to do well, you're going to take the necessary steps to improve yourself in your thinking in design. So, let's look at some stuff. So, I have some sketches here, we already talked about them briefly, really briefly, but I want to show you where I started in illustrator from these sketches. So, this is where I started and it looks absolutely terrible. Has no personality, of course I wasn't planning on using this for the logo, but this is where I began. This is the final logo type right here, and has a lot more personality. When I copied it over I lost my tittle, so I'm just going to fake it over here real quick. There you go. Nice. So, this is the final mark here, and I want to talk to you about kind of where I started so you can see the evolution of where this thing began, and where it ended up, and see all the nasty things in the middle, and kind of how I had my aha moments, and I hope it's valuable to you guys. The first thing I want you to do as you're creating your mark, when you decide to make revisions on what you have on your screen, I want you to copy over what it is you're working on. Do your revisions, copy it over, do more revisions so that over time you have this visual history that you can go back to and grab elements that really worked, and ignore those that don't. But it's really encouraging to see that process and to see the evolution, and see that things are improving. If you go in here and you have one thing in your screen and you're making changes, and you're changing typefaces and all that stuff, it's just making your life more difficult. So, I encourage you to have a nice large artboard, go outside the artboard, experiment, have fun, copy things over, and play around. So, briefly I'm going to go through some of the marks that didn't make the cut in kind of how I got there. So, as you can see, I have some type specimen here. I've some condensed phases, some slabs, some sans serifs, some custom type that I created, more of a beveled phase, more type specimens, some icons over here but we're not going to talk about those yet. So, in the very beginning, I wanted to create a message that was kind of approachable and fun, but the visual language I wanted to be very raw, so it fit the aesthetics of the building itself. So, this is where I started and it's not good at all, but that's okay because it's going to get better. It's going to evolve. I'm going to learn from the crappy things that I have on my artboard and things are going to get better, so it's okay. So, this is where we started. Let's move around our board, you can see that things are getting better or gooder. If it's bad, I'm sorry. Up here I go with some scripts here and kind of bringing the Germanness to the logo mark. Bringing some container elements in here didn't quite work out, started texturing some things, we'll talk about that later as well. Again, like these aren't very interesting, I mean they're getting a little bit better. This kind of looks like a Texas license plate, not very good. So, get a little crazy over here, skew in some type. Getting a little bit better in terms of hierarchy, plugging in a lot more information. I like the idea of having everything that you would possibly need to contact the restaurant in the mark itself, the address, the phone number, the website. It's very utilitarian. I feel like it works well in some cases, not all. But for this one, I thought it worked well. So, now I have this custom script here, it looks nice, it's fine. Nothing too crazy. I felt it was a little too feminine at this point. I thought it should be a little bit more masculine. So, going over here, we have this Texas steak, which I love the imagery of, but we are not a steakhouse even though we have one of the best steaks in town. I have some more work that I've done for other clients as inspiration. So, this is where I ended up on this art board, but that's not all. So, where I left off at the last art board, I copied that over into a new one and I started doing the same thing, copied the mark over, did some changes, copied it over, did some changes. I did these little flourishes for the corners. Again, I thought it was a little too feminine even though I liked the look of it. The different types of containers here, nothing good. Some inspiration over here, I found that really helpful. If you do have some good inspiration, bring those onto your art board so you can use as references, not to copy, but again, for reference. You can see how this mark is evolving. We got a little Texas flame here in the title of the eye. It's starting to improve. It's not that bad, it's not that good either. So, I'm done with that one. Let's move on to the next. This is where it started to really come together. Again, this is absolutely terrible, terrible use of space in here. These bits of information are containing the company name, and this is just bad. I brought in some other scripts here. Again, a little feminine, a little too delicate. I did this icon of the Longhorn skull or Bull skull, but again, I think that references steak houses more than it did the type of food that we serve our patrons. Then we had this thing here which I think is pretty nice, although it has it's good housekeeping vibe which totally misses the mark. So, yeah, it looks pretty good, but again, it's not there. All this stuff is custom typed. One thing that I try to do with my client work in terms of branding is to develop a custom type approach for their logo type. They respond really well to that because it's something that isn't easily reproduced. You can't just grab the type tool, type out the name and copy that. So, they respond really well to that. So, all this stuff is custom type and it's getting a little bit better. I don't know what this is, this is bad. I was like, okay, forget all of this. This is western Serif approach, let's go to Sans, it didn't quite work out. I don't want to talk about icons yet, but you can see that I used a lot of geometric shapes in my icon work. Let's continue on here, copied it over, started doing more revisions and additions. As you can tell by comparing these approaches to the final mark, there a lot of similarities that I brought over. So, starting to really take shape, I experimented with some extended slab serifs, didn't quite work out, I tried stacking some of that type, again, it didn't work. This didn't read well, ABI-HAUS. I wanted it to read as one word, it didn't quite work. Through that, I came up with this language right here, which is really simple; cow, lamb, pig, fish, bird, all stack type, which I ended up using in the facade of the restaurant. Anyways, through this exploration, things are going to happen. You're going to develop assets that you can use in different places. It's a beautiful thing. But if you didn't go through this process and copy over these elements that you're working on and improving them, then you probably wouldn't have found these nice little surprises. Let's zoom down here. All right, so this is where I'm at. If that's a fictional number, don't call it. So, once I had the overall layout of what I wanted, the type didn't feel quite right to me, it didn't feel finished. So, I went back to some old type that I had created and broke this down into steps. First, I had this beveled face. Really nice, required multiple colors, but I wanted to push this a little bit further, so I came up with a series of ornate serifs that I then used to finish up this type and I was really pleased with this. But again, I wanted a black and white version. Actually, it was an accident. I slaked everything. I converted that to strokes, then I came up with this, which blew my mind because I hadn't seen anything really similar to that, stylistically out there. Of course, it needed some work, like in the cross bars in here. It's getting a little tight in the negative spaces. We have some areas that we need to close off. But visually, I thought it was really pleasing. So, I use that as a starting point. You can tell here, I closed off this B, this bowl, the B there, and needed to do some more visions. If you can tell here, not only is the B much thicker, but if you compare it to the final one here, I did some more changes with that in-line here. I had a connect. I got rid of this area here, and visually, it works much better. So, that's how I fell into the ABI-HAUS logo. I never would have gotten this far if it weren't for that creation process and being able to see this thing evolve over time and fallen to it's own. I hope you guys learned from that. Now, for your assignment, I would like for you to approach your mark in a similar way. I want you to see your mark evolve over time. I want to see a broad history of what you developed and see how it's improved along the way. Yeah, so get started.
3. Creating Secondary Logos and Icons: So, the third part of this class is to learn about secondary logos and icons. We will look at the secondary logo and icon development in a talk of application of those elements. So, the steps that I want you guys to take, is to choose an element from your main logo mark that you created for stand-alone applications. So, you're not going to use the full logo but a portion of that for smaller applications. So, I also want you to develop a small set of icons in the same style as the logo. These should be simpler in execution so that they don't distract from the primary logo because these are only supporting elements. So, my approach with the Abi-House logo was really simple. I was looking at it and what were some of the most memorable elements to me? It was the Abi-House type itself and I decided to take the A from Abi-House because it was the most special letter Abi-House starts with an A. Yes, it makes sense. So, it was very simple. I just copy that over and I put a circle around it and that is the stand-alone mark that we used for aprons and sleeves of the employees' shirts and our pint glasses and all that. So, this is Abi-House in its simpler form. So, now let's talk a little bit about the icons. So, when I first start my icons, they don't look very good but I develop those and I polished them and end product is always much better. But it's okay to have something that isn't incredible. This right here, so very simple. We just used the Ellipse tool here, had a few circles. Copied that over in accident. Scale them down, and then connected them. I mean, it's just ridiculously simple. Of course, the proportions here are wrong. You can fudge it if you'd like, copy it over, reflect that line, attach it. So, geometric shapes are your friend. You should utilize them as much as possible, and you're going to see why. I used a lot of geometric shapes to create these logos, I mean, these icons. Again, this is a growler. It looks absolutely terrible. That's okay, it's going to get better. We didn't use that guy anyway. So, I did some with a counter. This pint glass with a counter, too complicated in my opinion. These are starting to get a little bit better. Adding more details, these are pretty nice but I didn't feel like it fit the final logo mark as much. I wanted them to be a little more raw. So, I started developing them a little bit further, again, using a lot of geometric shapes. This is a half circle in a rectangle, merged together with the Pathfinder tool, right over here at the Unite tool. Let's see where we end up here, getting a little bit simpler. Started creating some of the animals that represented the different items on our menu. Because originally, I created these to live on the menu so that at first glance, you could see the cow icon and know that that menu item was made with cow, or had cow in it. But I saw the menu getting a lot more complicated, which is not what you want for a menu. You want it to be able to read quickly. You don't want the customer to get frustrated or confused, and I felt it was getting that way. So, I ended up developing all these icons, not using them for what I intended them to be used for at the very beginning, but I found a place for them later and I'll show you that in a second. But as you can tell here, using lots of geometric shapes. This is the beginning of the cow here. Used a circle, rectangle tool which I just grabbed those anchor points and pulled them away, attached them to the circle, again, using the Unite tool on the Pathfinder tool, the Unite button on there. This is the shape I came up with. The ears are really simple. It's just two quarters of a circle that I merged together, just connecting those anchor points. Snap those together. So anyways, really simple. The horns, half circle. I added anchor points here, deleted that point to get the final cow mark. Don't ask me what this is, it's a hybrid of a duck, cow, and fish. It must have been late when I created that. I couldn't explain that one. So anyways, lots of geometric shapes. The knives, super simple. A quarter of a circle, rectangle, make sure it snips to the anchor point there. It's not what I wanted to do, but that's okay. Another rectangle. The knife was so easy to make. Look at that. Simple. So, this is the final icon set. Notice again, all the geometric shapes, and the beautiful thing about this set is that, a lot of the elements were used for multiple icons, like the ears for the cow were used for the body of the fish, were used for the ears of the lamb, which were used for the tail of the bird. It speeds up the process and it creates a continuity between the group of icons. Same with the glassware over here, the pint glass, the coffee mug, the wine glass, and the cocktail glass all started with a rectangle tool. Again, creating a consistency by reusing elements where you can, it'll really help you out and again, speed up the process. So, that's the icon set that I created originally for the menu but was too complicated. So, we decided to use that in the element for the exterior of our building or facade on the windows, as well as the gift cards. In here, you see an example of the secondary logo, the Abi-House A used on the door as you enter Abi-House. A nice little introduction to the restaurant. So, that covers secondary logos and icons, section three of our class. I hope you guys enjoyed it and learned some things.
4. Developing Brand Guidelines and Grids: Before I talk about the menu, I wanted to go over some Abi-Haus Guidelines that I made for myself. If you can see here I have this little page with all my assets. I had my primary logo, secondary logo which is the type only, another secondary logo for small applications and as well as our icons set in our color palette. Our color palette is split up into three colors. The gold being the vinyl signage and the black and the white for all of our print collateral and all that stuff. So, super simple, we do use a light blue on occasion but those are our three main colors. So, when I'm trying to figure out my design system often times I'll do a couple of examples. See how the type hierarchy works and this is what I came up with, the language I came up with. So, every food category on the menu will always be contained in a black rectangle and the type is knock out full sumo at 44 points. So, appetizers, dinners, lunch menu, brunch menu everything will be handled in that same way. Then food category subheads like our anytime drinks. The hair of the dog, the Haus Cocktails all of those will be handled with a knockout full middleweighted 18 points. Our food and drink items will be knocked out welterweight 14 points. Our food and drink item descriptions will be knock out junior middleweight at 10 points right here. Our food and drink item price will be a knockout welterweight 14 point and drink item ingredient will be a graphic styling regular 10 point that script here. Then we also have vertical and horizontal rules for content separation. We use icons for space filler, and secondary messages and merge call out on the right hand column over hear. Again, kind of a space filler but serves more of a purpose than the icons themselves. These do have a call to action by an official Abi-Haus shirt for $20 Long Live Abilene an important message for us and the little craft beer call out here. So, once I established all of that stuff I kind of set my rules. This is how I'm going to approach all of this different type of content. It's going to create a consistency and readability is great. Just a nice visual language to look at. So, now I want to talk a little bit about creating a grid. For your menu or whatever collateral you're making. I'm not going to go into the designing of it but I do want to show how you can create a nice grid and attach tie to that grid. So, right now, I have a new document here. We'll just do one page go ahead and do 11 by 17 number of columns. I like to have a lot of options I'm going to go with 12. So you go to Okay here. Put that alone. This is what you come up with. I apologize if all the noise in the background I'm at the restaurant and people are crunching up ice. So, I'm sorry. So, we have our 12 columns here. Right now we need to show the baseline grid. So, if you go over here to view grids and guides. Show baseline grid, your baseline will pop up. Okay. So, we're off to a good start. Now, grab your tied tool and a lot of students have a hard time knowing where to click and drag to type windows. Think of it as a cross here. Okay. So it needs to be centered, the top left of the grid, draw down and you always want to end on the left side of these little gutters, right. So, you have a space in between each paragraph or body of content. So, you can go ahead and type something. Abi-Haus is awesome and a lot of fun! Okay, notice that the type isn't attached to the baseline. It's a easy fix, we're going to go ahead and change the typeface here. To Naco because that's what I've been using, you go over here to a full middle way. What we need to do, I went ahead and clicked off of the text bought a whole control. I'm going to click on the text blog or text frame. I'm going to go here to text frame options. Baseline options, and what I want to offset the baseline to the letting. Is still not going to be attached because our letting right here is a 14 point. I'm going to change the point size. Point size can be anything. The important thing is that the letting is divisible by 12. As long as you're letting is divisible by 12, and your baseline options are offset to the letting everything will line to the baseline. It's really nice and convenient and everything's is me ligned perfectly and you're going to be happy that you set up a grid and you restrict with your guidelines. Yeah, everything will be cohesive and beautiful. So, I hope that was helpful.
5. On Brand and On Purpose: Designing the Menu: So, in this next section we're going to be talking about the supporting cast in the design systems. Developing a series of collateral and objects that bring your brand further through icons, fonts, and signage. At first, I want to talk about the menu a little bit because I feel like that helps define the overall type structure, because it is the most complicated piece of design in the restaurant. So, we'll start there and that will help define our typographic visual language and yeah, so let's get started. So, as I said in the very beginning, Jimbo and I had no restaurant experience before opening this place up, so we knew it was very important to hire the right people. The chef, obviously being one of the key elements to our success. So, let me give you guys a little advice, if you are starting a company and you're trying to approach professionals that you want to be involved with your company, try to blow their minds with design. Because when they see these things, these menu mock-ups. It feels real to them, and special and they have a sense of these things can actually happen, and I had an opportunity in front of me. So, this is our first menu. We didn't use this in the restaurant, this is what we approached Kailer, head chef with, as well as Drew Pearson, our bar manager. So, the structure is, there's nothing special to it. It's very similar to any other menu you may come across, which isn't what we wanted, but it helped to get our concept across to them and they really appreciated that. So, I'll just point out some of these things. We have our logo over here in the left column. We have our headlines, brunch, appetizers, lunch. All the finer details are in a regular Sans or this nice script here, all the prices are in yellow, in parentheses, very simple look and feel to this particular venue. Before you start designing your menu, I want you to establish a few things upfront. First, what type are you going to use for your titles. What type are you going to use for the detail elements? What type are you going to use for the body copy? All of these things can be established in the very beginning, so that you're not experimenting during the design phase, right? Like you've already establish your rules and guidelines. This is going to make your life so much simpler. So, yeah. Don't go crazy with the design elements, like I use these horizontal rules here just for structure, to help structure into break apart these different sections brunch, appetizers, lunch, etc. I had a narrower column on the left for drinks, and later drinks, and all that stuff. Again, this is very surface level compared to the first menu we ended up using right here. So, we have in the header over here, Abi-Haus large, bold, stands out nicely. But, we also wanted the sittings to stand out a lot, the brunch, the lunch, the dinner, and incorporate the hours, and like a nice little message, a nice encouraging message, just to bring a smile to the customers' face. So, let's zoom in here, and look at a few things. So, yeah, you're starting to see my approach here. We're using these bolds, I'm using knockout here. This bold condensed phase here for the menu items. You see this GF and a V here that stands for a gluten-free and a vegan, that's called out. Right here, probably not the best place to put this information, but our servers educate our customers on their needs as well, so it's not ideal, but this is what we did. So, we put the prices at the end of every description, so that it's more likely that the customer reads through the description of the item before looking at the price. So, if you see the price first, you may not even look at that item and move on to the next thing, we didn't want our customers to do that. So, we have the asterisk over here, that calls out the under-cooked poultry, meat and fish. So, you can see that on those items. Again, I'm using horizontal, vertical rules to break up different pieces of information, the add-ons cautioned into separate one column of the brunch items to the other. For the lunch section right here, same approach, nothing new here. This was honestly a concern for me, hoping that the customer would be able to read this well. This is the heavy burgers step one, pick your meat. Do you want beef or do you want the black bean and rice? Step two, what sides do you want? These sides, are zero dollars. These sides, where toppings rather a dollar, bacon two dollars. Pick your sauce. These sauces are free, these sauces are an extra dollar. So, I felt like, well, what I was concerned about is that customer look at this and not follow the steps and be confused, but it worked out, it worked out all right. So, drinks from the public house, this is what we named our bar area, so you have your strong drinks over here, tea, coffee, soda. Your stronger drinks Basil Gimlet, Mimosa, Corpse Reviver. Strongest drinks: Manhattan, Dark & Stormy, Sazerac, whatever. I had some extra space I needed to fill, and that was a perfect opportunity to bring in the icon set. Again, it doesn't mean anything, no. But, it's a nice texture and visual element to incorporate into the menu and it fills right. It doesn't feel out of place, it's nice, simple. Just detail. I decided to add this. We really do care, Abi-Taxi phone number here and it's plugged into our drink menu because drinking and driving is bad. So, don't do it. Anyways, yes, merchandise. We have merchandise. Buy an official Abi-Haus shirt for $20. We have a 10 precent discount for all students, active military, and senior citizens not including drinks or tips. Again, we try to incorporate a little humor here and there. So, I don't know if that comes across, hopefully, it does, and then some contact information on the bottom. Email us at hello@good-haus.com, or call us at our number. Like us on Facebook, follow us @Abi_haus. So, this menu served us pretty well at first, but we learned a few things. We had a few elements in here that needed to be improved. I'll get to those in just a second. This is the flip side of the menu. It's two-sided. The dinner section. Appetizers, dinner, desserts and again, the drinks. Same footer same approach without the contact information. Why? Because I ran out of space. Is that a good reason? No, not really. I did feel like a lot of emphasis was put on the desserts which is okay, but it's in your face and not much to show for it. Another problem we had was this script is really delicate and I wasn't thinking about our older customers and their lack of vision. So, that was one thing that stood out immediately and we just got around to doing our menu change with new items. So, we approached that a little bit differently. Let's see over here. Okay, so our brunch and lunch menu, similar concept. Header on top. We stripped out a lot of the unnecessary details like the grays over here which I did like but it wasn't quite necessary. So, I stripped those away. We have our brunch Saturday, Sunday 10 a.m. till close. On Sundays we are open later for brunch than we are on Saturdays. So, this menu over here was problematic because it said two when in reality, on Sundays we're up until three. So, that had to be fixed and that's a simple fix, 10 a.m. till close. So, we have our items again, approached in a similar fashion. I did change the script here which is much better. Even though it is a stencil script, it reads really nicely in small sizes. Another thing we added that we thought was appropriate was this message at the bottom. For freshness, plates are presented to your table as they're prepared. We are a small boutique restaurant and we have the shotgun style kitchen and if you have a table of 15 people, not all of your food it's going to get out at the same time. It's not a big jump. It's not large gaps of time, but we do deliver the foods as they are prepared for freshness. So, we didn't have that in the previous menu, but it's nice to have that so, we set up our customers expectations. So, this is one change that I thought was a really appropriate. We had some issues previously with customers looking at the appetizers and dinner section during brunch and lunch, which we did not serve at that time and vice versa. With people again, brunch and lunch during dinner and I thought that this is simple solution. Brunch and lunch side of the menu will be white, appetizing dinner section will be black. Makes perfect sense. I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier, but it's already made a huge difference, just a slight color change, well not really slides, the big color change at any rate. Again, the structure is very similar. I established the smaller design elements that I would use throughout horizontal vertical rules, the weight of those strokes, the titles of the sections, and the typeface that was used in the point size. Same with the scripts and the explanations here, the details of the menu items here. All that was established going into the design of the menu. Aside from the type and these little detailed elements that you plan on adding, you should set up a grid. Right here, I have three columns on the bottom, I have more or less two columns on the top here. It was roughly setup on a 12 column grid, but be careful with the way you align your type. You shouldn't have a center type, left align, right align, completely justified type all in one page. It gets a little chaotic. I was a little cautious about this, centering the type within the Abi-burger's section. I feel like it worked pretty good so, I was okay with that, but be cautious with your alignment and your grid structure. Define all your points sizes for you type and how they interact with different types of information and have fun with it.
6. How Typographic Murals Define the Space: So, in this video, we're going talk about extending the brand in the interior and the exterior space. We're going to look at the individual murals in them as a whole, what our approach was and what we're trying to accomplish with those murals and how they add to the overall experience. Good friends of mine Dana Tanamachi and Jeff Rogers came in from New York to help me out with these murals and I could not have done it without them. Well, I probably could have, but it would have looked near as good. So, each of us had ownership in different pieces throughout the restaurant, but we all collaborated on the bulk of them, and I couldn't be more happy with the outcome. When I look at it, I just have an overwhelming sense of pride and joy, and I'm just very thankful that they are able to be a part of this project that I'm so passionate about. So, before we started the Abi-Haus, there was no place in town where you could get fine dining and sit outdoors and eat. So, we knew that needed to be a big part of who we are. We are trying to educate our customers in not only food and drink, but also healthy mural atmosphere plays into that. It can really enhance your overall dining experience. We didn't only create these exterior murals just for looks. They also inform our customers in the types of dishes that we serve here at Abi-Haus, even if it is on a surface level, soda, craft beer, cocktails, coffee, cow, lamb, pig, fish. Probably the most important mural that we have is the Long Live Abilene on the back wall, and you can kind of see it on the current picture here. That was our intention. We wanted the passer-by or the person who's driving by the restaurant to see this huge mural in and give them a sense of pride. Again, I should explain that in a little more detail. Abilene is known for being boring or so they say. There is even a shop in town that sells, Keep Abilene Boring shirts, and my whole thought was it doesn't need to be boring and a lot of people feel the same way. They like to go out, and they like to have fun and now they have a place for that. So, Long Live Abilene. Another incredible piece done by Dana Tanamachi in the restaurant, it quotes, "Good food ends in good talk." That is what we want you guys to experience. We want you to come in here with your friends or your family and eat good food and have great conversations and make a lasting memories and that's just a nice little reminder. Take it easy and enjoy life, and enjoy food, and life's too short. So, enjoy it. This is a piece that Dana and I collaborated on, "Abilene I can fly." So it kind of has a lot of meaning, but this is just to bring a smile on our customers' faces. I wasn't planning on doing this piece, but Dana and Jeff Rogers encouraged me to do so. It's kind of a rip-off of, "I believe I can fly", "Abilene I can fly". Abilene is the home of an Air Force base, and it also has a positive meaning like I can fly, I can do anything, "Abilene I can fly". So, it kind of has a lot of meaning, but in a playful way. So, this is a nice little piece that I enjoy quite a bit. This isn't the best picture, but one of the really important parts of the restaurant is the chalkboard menu on the far wall here. We all three put a lot of work into it and it serves a great purpose. This is where we put all of our drink specials, all of our dinner and lunch specials, dessert specials. It's our special board, but it's a nice focal point in the restaurant and it's fun and playful. We have these fun little bears that are holding the frame of the menu. It's just a nice little piece. Then we have random murals throughout the rest of the restaurant like, "Please wait to be seated" and "restroom, one at a time please", just little bits of fun here and there. I'm going to jump back to this photo of Jeff Rogers working on a mural that says, "Folks here don't treat you mean." This is something we always try to strive for. We want to have a safe environment in this venue where people can come in and just have a great time and really connect to our staff from the servers to the management and that's really valuable to us. We want to make these long-term relationships with the customers. We want them to come time and time again and in order to do that, we wanted to build a friendship. So I feel like this mural, the message behind it is really powerful and, yeah, I think it's something that everyone should live by. Notice how the approach for these different murals are pretty different. Some have these really beautiful ornate borders. Some are a little more straightforward like, "Long Live Abilene" mural and some are completely free-handed like, "Folks here don't treat you mean", but there is a cohesion amongst them and I feel like that has to do with the approach using the chalk markers and just having a raw quality to these illustrations in these hand-drawn letters and adding little small details like ornate serifs, and the delicate ornate borders. All work really well together and, yeah, it turned out wonderfully. I couldn't have asked for more.
7. Texturing: So, this is the wrapping it up conclusion and helpful tips section, where I want to touch on some topics that my students have a hard time with. So, the first thing I want to teach you guys, is how to create a subtle texture on your logo, or icon, or anything else for that matter. So, I have my logo here. I'm going to copy this and I'm going to paste it into a Photoshop. Our board here and scale it up a little bit. We're going to be jumping back and forth with Photoshop, and Illustrator. The beautiful thing about this process, is that you don't have to get your hands dirty creating a texture. But it will require you do some preparation beforehand. It would be great if you had access to a Breyer and some printmaking ink. You can do some textures, scan them in, like I have right here and creating a brushes, really simple. We're going to be using a brush on the eraser tool to texture logo. So, if you get the marquee tool over here and you select an area of texture, you can go up here to edit, define brush preset. Good. Okay. You have this nice textured brush to work with. Right now, I have green slide, that's what's screen. So, I have one that I use pretty often. It's very similar to the one we just created, but I'm going to show you how it works. First, scrub the eraser tool, go to the drop down here, select your brush, need to rasterize our image and I'm just going to tap couple of times on the screen. Notice that you can see some of the grays in here, from the brush that we just used. Then, go to filter, sharpen and do that a couple of times, to make it nice and crisp. Looks pretty good. We are going to drag and drop this into illustrator and we're going to do a live trace, an image trace. If you have CS 5.5 or earlier, it's going to be a lot easier. If you have CS 6 or Creative Cloud, you're going to have to play around with some things. So, I have my raster image selected. I'm going to go to the drop down at the top of the screen. Again, if you're below CS 6, choose the lettering option. I made a custom one and I named a logo too. Unfortunately, I didn't document that process, so I apologize. So, you select that and it factorizes your logo. So, I'm going to expand that. Sometimes, if you notice we'll select this logo. Come over here and look the color, the fill is multicolored,. Even though you can't see it, it's a transparent color. So, with the direct selection tools, like the black, go to select, same, fill color, I'm just going to select all the black on the entire board. Notice the dense like that, we're going to paste that. So, now we have this nice black logo, no other colors. I'm going to go over here to the pathfinder and unite that logo. So, we don't have a whole bunch of floating pieces. Let's go ahead and delete these guys. So, this is what we have. If you are a little concerned with the amount of texture, but you've already went through the process and you don't want to go through it again, and you want to close off some of these areas, something that I found worked nicely, is to create a stroke. It looks terrible right now, but we're going to delete this error. Decrease the stroke weight, 0.25. Notice that, it's starting to close up some of these areas. Oftentimes, I'll go over here to the stroke and I'll have the cabs and the corners rounded off. Yeah, that's how you can create a simple textured logo quickly. So, I hope that was helpful.
8. Type Choices: Oftentimes, I'll get the question, how do you know what type to pair with other type? They want to mix and match type. They have a really hard time doing that well. So, my advice to you guys would be to first, explore with a typeface that has a large font family and experiment with combining bolds, light italics, and extended versions of these typefaces, all in one lockup. I think that's a good way to start out. Just picking one typeface with a large font family. Then, if you want to be a little more adventurous, I would say explore with type that was designed or created during the same era. Hopefully, there will be some connections there. That would be a nice exercise for you guys to go through, but when it comes down to it, people hire designers for their design approach and their taste. That can be a difficult thing to teach. But you guys know, hopefully, what looks good and what doesn't. I encourage you all to dissect design that you love, figure out why you love it and try to mimic that. I'm not saying copy word, but figure out what's so successful about the things that you're looking at, and try to accomplish that in your own work. You have to start somewhere. It's okay not to have Sagmeister quality work in your sophomore year in college, that's fine. But use those inspirations to drive you, and push you, and to encourage you to spend more time in design and create better more beautiful thoughtful designs.
9. Final Thoughts and Conclusion: I also want you to become comfortable with creating design systems specifically with typography and small web design elements. Establishing rules and guidelines for yourself in the very beginning will save you a lot of time and create a consistency in your type. Combining that with a strict grid that you attach your type to, you know have all of your type aligned to the baseline, it's going to create a beautiful structure, nice and clean. That would be definitely something that would improve the quality and consistency of your work. Also, icons, using geometric shapes and combining those in different ways to create the different marks that you're going for. In combining all of these elements together, the brand mark that you create with the different combinations of type with your type design system in your grid, all of these things working together will create a brand that is more memorable, that will stand out amongst your competitors. Hopefully, you guys will be able to accomplish that in your own work and I look forward to seeing what you produce. Hope you guys learned a lot in this class. Even if you learned one thing, I'd be happy but hopefully you'll take away more than that. It was an honor being a part of the Skillshare class, and thank you guys for listening and paying attention. I'll keep my eyes out on some of the work that you upload and yes, good luck. Thank you, guys and God bless.
Ryan Feerer, Designer & Illustrator. Abi-Haus Restaurateur.
