Role

Client

Golden Palace

Golden Palace is a Chinese takeaway located in Henderson, Auckland. They make some delicious food, and they're a few km from where I live (dangerous). They don't have any branding/website or anything, so I decided to have my take on it and this is the final result.

Project overview

As this was a personal project, the client had no input in the final design, therefore all the research and decision making has been done by me.

As a first step, I proceeded with a general analysis of the brand and the current assets:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/c5fbb238-5323-4a8f-82ad-fa407ebd9a8a/6032dcf356982125e043104c_Screen_Shot_2021-02-22_at_11.20.23_AM.png

This is the original logo.

Hmm...

After establishing that this takeaway restaurant had close to non-existent branding, I confidently moved on to research.

The process had this structure:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/b6247431-7786-4d83-b67d-f06850760054/6032dd50d728519dcb40d033_Screen_Shot_2021-02-22_at_11.21.13_AM.jpg

The website.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/2549b2f8-594f-486a-8eff-b53d1f836110/6032e0abd728517a1740ea2e_Golden_Palace_-_Menu.jpg

I will not hide that I'm bad at sketching, and this is the proof, but it never stopped me from doing my job properly and I don't really mind. At the bottom of the page, you can see my ideas generation process and the transformation from drawing number one to number 20.

I have a personal rule of 20 drawings for the ideas generation process, and crazy enough I reached my final design idea at the last drawing. This goes to show that it doesn't matter how good your current idea is, it can always be better.

Illustrator

After settling on a few different ideas, I moved on to the computer, transferring the designs and perfecting them on Illustrator. This showed me that some designs weren't feasible as a logo for many different logistical reasons, which led my selection down to one.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/c19f2e7c-a401-4266-9981-b2661db54eb1/Golden_Palace_-_Menu.jpg

I tweaked and tested many variables until I finally came to peace with the final logo.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/52662661-576f-4b85-b293-6f0ffb5ac026/Golden_Palace_-_Before_and_after.jpg

The final logo looks great and I'm really proud of it! So I created some mock-ups to get a realistic feel, but also to validate my design in a real-world scenario.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/8233f3ed-bc26-4a74-a89f-22b3bbfb565c/Golden_palace_window_mockup.jpg