Exercise: A menu card.

This exercise requires me to do an illustration for a chain of high quality seafood restaurants. The brief describes the restaurants as being sophisticated, modern, bright and contemporary, and based in several European cities.

The first port of call was to do some research on existing European seafood restaurants and get a taste for the kinds of menu and logo illustrations already present in the market. I was pretty surprised how difficult it was to find seafood restaurants that actually had logos or menus that featured any illustrations at all. Compounding things further is a real lack of seafood chains in Europe in general. It seems that pan-European restaurant franchises that specialise in seafood is not really a thing. This was a little bit of a relief, because what I expected to find was lots of very simple, modern, almost deconstructed fish logos, but it seems the market is more ripe for experimentation and variety.

I did find a few noteworthy restaurants that did use illustrations. Some used very simple, conventional logo design:

And others used a different approach.

I noticed a lot of restaurants using a kind of simple, handwritten style font. It looks like a trend kind of selling the idea of being very natural, organic and less “corporate”, if that makes sense. It was easy to identify this as a modern trend.

As I thought about the exercise I thought about what would personally appeal to me. The exercise says that food depicted must be “visually appealing”, and what came to my mind was the work of Studio Ghibli, who incidentally craft the most beautiful representations of food in their animated films. This article at boredpanda.com showcases a woman who lovingly recreates some of the meals from Ghibli films, and demonstrates what I mean when I say the studio is great at drawing delicious food!

Here is a fantastic supercut of various Ghibli films and the tasty food within, compiled by video editor Herrozzy.

When I first read the exercise I expected to be doing something very minimal and deconstructed, but actually on doing the market research, it seems like many modern restaurants are embracing a more hand-drawn, natural style of advertising, which came as a relief to me. Those kind of corporate logos with the solid colour vector artwork strikes me as a bit dated, and it looks like the market agrees. I was eager to see what I could cook up.

I began by looking for modern, simple dishes that I thought would look good as an illustration. I had an idea what I wanted, and compiled a few different references to come up with this sketch of a grilled sea bass.

I recreated my sketch digitally, trying to keep in mind to keep it very simple and fresh. I took inspiration from the earlier animated images to make something that I thought felt modern, and you might see in a trendy seafood restaurant.

In reconsidering, I felt a bit silly choosing to draw the prepared meal before it had been grilled, feeling like a cold raw fish was not very trendy and appetising! So I returned to it and updated the picture.

Marking in the grill lines I think improves the visual appeal of the image. Of course it was also important to make sure the image holds up at a smaller scale, 40mm x 40mm.

Overall I like the sort of hand-drawn look and think it wouldn’t feel out-of-place on the menu card of a modern seafood restaurant. I think the meal is simple enough to work at a small-scale and detailed enough to work on a large one.