Scallywag's — Demo
Scallywag’s is a demo conceptualized from the thought of what a restaurant could be like if it were as fully committed to a pirate theme as possible. In reality, training thousands of waiters and waitresses to speak and act like pirates would be rather daunting, but for this demo we aren’t going to let that stop us. We wanted to create a brand identity that attempts to visualize the raw realism of being a pirate: crashing waves, sand, aged parchment paper, and, of course, treasure.
The mood board aimed to capture the thrilling, gritty fantasy of being a pirate and includes things like cannon fire, parrots, skulls, swords, gold, candles, a treasure map and the wheel of a ship. My personal favorite concept derived straight from this mood board are black napkins that unfurl into a secret, hidden Jolly Roger flag for taking selfies at your table — or maybe try your hand at fashioning it into a bandana? That is, before you’ve used it to clean up with. Overall, Scallywag’s leans heavily into traditional, edgy pirate aesthetics.
The color palette below features elements based on fire and water, as well as sand and treasure. The blue is lighter as opposed to darker to reflect a more seafood-inclined direction as a brand, in the hopes of the brand being more approachable and a serious contender for regularly dining customers, and to avoid being labeled as ‘just a gimmick or novelty venue’.
We felt the initial logo design satisfied the purposes of this demo, and were happy with the general direction that it took the concept of Scallywag’s as a fictitious restaurant. Simply put, it evokes the exact fantasy that we were looking for. We felt the first pass at a design concept was decent, however, there were definitely areas of the design (and the logo) that could be improved or changed, which led us to create another, updated design.
And that’s how we ended up with our current design. The waves were changed to a darker blue, the map design was made more clear, and the pirate ship at the top of the logo was split into distinctive parts, making sure the Sun stood out in the background, and giving the waves underneath the ship their blue colorization and separating them from the ship.