La Casa de Las Calacas
Background
When I was employed at PrintandPixel.com, I took part in a “studio portfolio” project meant to produce examples of our various skill sets as designers that we could show our clients. The project requirements were that we design branding for an imaginary restaurant and show how the assets we produced could be applied to various deliverables. My project partner Jai Fujimoto and I thought it would be fun to do a Día de los Muertos themed taco dive bar.
Visual Identity
To appeal to our theoretical Austinite audience of community/local oriented, progressive 30 to 50 somethings, my partner and I decided to add some punk and nostalgia to our theme. After gathering visual research from a variety of Austin dive bars and Día de los Muertos themed restaurants, I began work on some stylized illustrations to find a suitable visual identity. I started with a punk Catrina for the logo and developed additional assets from there. American traditional tattoos (which I have designed for friends in the past) were a big source of inspiration.
Above: My hand drawn illustrations for the La Casa de las Calacas logo, decorative elements, and sticker.
Above: Finalized illustrated assets after being image traced and edited.
Above: La Casa de las Calacas moodboard.
Logo Development
With a visual direction set, I started developing our logo. I knew that this brand would require a variety of logo styles and orientations, something that would look good on everything from a T-shirt to a website, so I explored different ways to orient text around my punk Catrina. The illustration was an irregular shape so it not only made sense to make the type similarly irregular, but it also matched our theme. A grungy cowboy typeface like Kiln paired well with the Tex-Mexness of our theme and dive location, and drawing from the punk side of our theme, I distorted the characters so that they would be somewhat reminiscent of punk zine typography.
Above: Logo variants for La Casa de las Calacas. The Catrina illustration in the white-on-black variants was edited to make it slightly more legible.