There are a lot of unexpressed feelings I have collected throughout my years of waitressing, especially working brunch every single weekend for 2 years straight. TLDR: it's hell, but I thought this would be great opportunity to get them out in more detail:  

From List A) I chose:

• receipt printer aka the printer behind the bar, where new orders come out, non-stop, while you are already behind on the old orders
• coffee machine: I just really like them, and it is where I did spent a lot of my time during brunch
• boozy breakfast: nothing beats the feeling of someone ordering a beer at 10 am in the morning, brunch seems to be just an excuse to start drinking at breakfast
• adjusted menu: not a shift went by without one or several items from the menu not being available or different to the way they are described on the menu

From List B) I chose:

• Evolution of the coffee, 10 am, the coffees still beautiful, latte art and all, then slowly, with the stress building, they get uglier and uglier, they are spilled, the spoons, saucers and eventually the coffee cups will have run out, until orders get misread or lost entirely. Such is evolution of the coffee during brunch.
• Worst Spot: somehow new customers always choose the one dirty table among all clean ones to sit down, or ignore warnings such as there are wasps or it's about to rain, just so switch tables 10 min later saying there are wasps or it's raining.
• Free-spirited mom: Does letting your kid draw on tables or inside of menus, run between the legs of staff holding heavy or hot trays or play in the yard in broken glass make them grow into a better adult? Honestly maybe, what do I know about childcare... (mom, because most of childcare is still put on women)
• Uneven Cake: Holding the power of picking a piece from a very unevenly cut cake for a customer you are face-to-face with is...honestly really overwhelming, it does feel kinda nice though when they have been rude.
• Special Guest Dog: no matter how long the list of orders or how high the stacks of dirty dishes, I will drop everything to get a closer look at a newly arrived dog.

Receipt printer:

• having a high stack of orders was the most important part, making it fit into the square was the hardest part
• I am also unsure if “iconic” enough for people that haven’t worked in gastronomy to recognize it.

Coffee machine

• Initially i wanted to have the “coffee are gold” thing in there because the first question I always ask is if they would like a coffee and they nearly always respond with “yes” with such joy and relief, but then I got in my head about barista espresso machines and the coffee grinder always being separate and having to many ideas in one.
• I think I was too afraid to have the machine be such a simple shape, so I tried to combine the parallel THING (which I found too charming to loose) with the shape of the first drawing, but think it looks a bit forced.

Boozy breakfast

• definitely wanted the food to just be a single croissant as the bare minimum alibi to order an array of alcoholic drinks.
• was thinking mirroring as a nod to seeing double from being drunk, but it felt a bit too whimsical
• I do think I should have made the croissant much smaller to bring home the main point

Adjusted menu

• not really any exploration there ups, but again avoiding the “just a square”-shapeOn to Set 2!

Free-spirited mom:

• only drew one concept because I really loved the drawings from the free sketches (I have peaked with that baby on the right)
• did get rid of the kid drawing inside the menu cause that would have been confusing in combination with the annotated menu

Worst spot:

• really hard to make it fit into what I understood a spot illustration to be, and so as to not make it seem like the people where leaving the messy table.
• I was thinking spotlight, maybe sparkles around it (or inside of the peoples eyes), with the table much more saturated to underscore it being appealing instead of negatively connotated.
• didn’t really like any of them

Uneven Cake:

• If I had straight up depicted the server, then I would have had to commit on what it is that you are feeling in that moment, which I really didn’t want
• So I was exploring the POV of the customer, and being lucky or unlucky in getting a big piece, to return back to the staff, depicted as a clown, because i felt like fun, madness and clownery (and a bit of evil) sums it up the best

Special Guest Dog:

• initially I was really set on the whole “dropping everything” aspect, and the juxtaposition of everything is a mess around you but you are having a really special and sweet moment with that dog, but I found the concepts to be to similar to the “free-spirit” one
• then I tried going into the direction of the dog being treated like a king instead of the customers, but was super stumped on the compositions
• SOO I gave up and then turned to Mr. Tom Froese’s other class on composition and went back to the drawing board

 

Dog:

• really struggled with the dog because I wanted to have it be big and cover the man’s face to show who truly is important but scale is honestly not something I’m super comfortable with playing around with, neither is letting go of anatomy (especially with subjects that I am not really familiar with!!)
• stylistically it felt all a bit confused haha

Mom:

• the whole having the baby grabbing the tray with hot drinks in combination with the rest didn’t work out composition-wise, so I simplified it down to it tearing apart the menu
• but the action also felt to separate from the mess of the table so a bit lackluster…?
• so later I changed the whole spirit a bit by making the baby sleepy and sweet and the mess much bigger to have a lovely juxtaposition between the crime and the criminal 

Latte Evolution

• also really struggled with the composition, when you are thinking evolution you are thinking of a line, but then trying to make it work within a square…and the clock circle thing felt to similar to the shape of the clown-cake thing…
• so yeah i rejected it entirely
• was thinking to play around with that with the coffees getting more lack-luster so does the art style, drawing outside of the lines, squiggly lines, etc, i think that could be cute if I ever where to touch it again

Worst Spot

• also gave up on that one, just wanted to project to be over :> , maybe it could work as more of a spread, or a different concept entirely

Sooo the final

Thanks for viewing/reading/being sweet to staff <3