Yamato [Japan]

So I mentioned before that I would be redesinging the logo, busines card, & takeout menu for Yamato Japan (a hibachi & sushi bar in Leominster). I really wish I'd taken pictures of their menu and stuff because it was REALLY HORRIBLE. But Krasner asked for the menu and card so he could have a before and after of my design (I'll say right now that he LOVES what I did and expects it to be in my portfolio and I'm sure I'll get a 4.0 on it! ^_^). But I do enjoy their sushi, so eventually I'll go back and get a new menu and card, and when I do I'll be sure to post them. They used a million different colors and fonts and everything clashed and was horrible. Their main logo and font are bad enough as it was, so you can probably imagine by looking at those that they don't have good designer on hand.

I started off with the logo. Theirs is this really horrible image...I wanted to keep the temple idea, but make something that had cleaner lines. I took the two characters on the top right (which mean 'temple' in Japanese) and then merged them and edited them until I got what I was looking for. The process goes down the right side, and then to the left...I eventually chose the one in the middle of the bottom row. I did try more traditional temple shapes, but I didn't like those as much.

The front and back of the business card. Their card was black with white type, and then their horrible logo in a white circle (I kept that idea), and they also had yellow and red type, as well as dark blue lines (which of course looks horrible on black). So I used a more simple color pallatte, with a dark (seaweed) green, a neon (wasabi) green, a (rice) grey, and then (salmon) pink and (tuna) red. I think I have a nice theme going. ^_^

This is the takeout menu. You'll want to click on it to see it larger. I had to type out all their text, and that took the bulk of my time. I did a lot of this sort of stuff in high school though, and I enjoy playing the with size and spacing in the type to get all the words to fit. I changed their layouts only a little, and kept the same size of the takeout menu too, which is about 5x16. I like the little 4 inch panels...I thought it was a neat little compact menu.

This is definitely the project that I worked hardest on this semester (the Miyamoto brochure being a close second) and it's definitely my favorite piece. At first when we were told to pick our final projects, I was lost without direction. I wasn't sure how much work we were supposed to do, and normally I don't function well without instruction. But I had their crappy old menu by my computer as something that I wanted to redesign anyway...and I really enjoyed the chance to do this. It was nice to finish out the semester with a renewed sense of accomplishment and inspiration.