Reimagining the Frullati Cafe Brand
Project Created: 2024
Frullati Cafe is a sandwich shop located in SanMarcos TX, where they sell delicious sandwiches, salads, and smoothies.The first location opened in 1997 in Austin, TX, but they opened a few more locations down the line around surrounding cities. They opened in the summer of last year, and I got to try one of their sandwiches, and it was great.
Projects Purpose
This project is a reimagining of the Frullati brand and logo, rather than a simple refresh or redesign, allowing us to explore creative branding without making major changes. The goal is to develop skills in creating logos and brand materials through a meaningful project. I selected Frullati Cafe because it had just opened last year, which perfectly worked out because the project’s requirement was to search for a newly opened business/small business.
Target Audience
The target audience for Frullati Cafe are a wide variety of people, but mostly a younger audience. Their menu of sandwiches, salads, and smoothies appeals to an audience who is interested in eating healthy, and staying active.
The Frullati Cafe Design
Some of the features that stood out to me from the brand are its color palette and logo design. The brand uses bright greens, reds, yellows, and oranges, which are noticeable on their indoor decorations, but most importantly their ingredients that are usually on sandwiches, smoothies, and salads. The logo itself incorporates 2 to 3 colors, such as a darker red, and a tan outline around the logo, along with the font being mixed with a script font. Overall the design side of things are used pretty well for this brand.
Color Palette & Font Choice
For the primary colors, I drew inspiration from the location itself, such as the creme colored walls, while incorporating colors that were used on the Frullati website. With the typography, I selected the Hobeaux font for the main logo because it a perfect match, and its has similarities to the logo’s sharp and rounded shape, creating a consistent design for the logo.
First Steps
Sketching out ideas
When brainstorming ideas, I went for their food choices for the starting point of the logo. I created 5 different sets of sketches, I ended up going with the 4th row of sketches, because those looked the best for a logo design because they were less detailed than the others.
I wanted to mix a bit of all food items together, but I wasn’t sure on how exactly, so I decided to sketch out 2 final sketches where I merge a sandwich, and a boba drink to create a logo that shows the food items Frullati is known for. Although a salad isn’t visible on the sketch, you could count the inside of the sandwich being a salad, which does work out in the end.
Constructing Logo
After the sketching I came up with 3 different Icons; a smoothie, sandwich, and a salad. I wanted to see if one of these would work for a final logo, or if I should merge them in some way after all. The color palette I used was the one made for the I also used these designs for different mockups also, so I still use them in some way.
Final Logo
The final logo consists of both the smoothie, and the Sandwich which turned out great. I also tested out some other variations to see if the colors looked any better than the final one I chose.
For the older logo that I created, I felt like there was too much detail on it, which would look messy if the logo was minimized, so I decided to remake it a year later.
The redesigned version is much better, because I simplified the ingredients where you can still tell the type of ingredients without adding details. I also added the text underneath instead because the name Frullati wasn’t legible inside of the first logo.
Logos History
Primary Logo
Creating Brand Materials
When creating the assets for the mockups, I wanted to create designs that made sense for a cafe and bakery, so I created different materials that you would usually see in a restaurant, along with some casual business designs.
Mockups
Reflection
This was one of the first projects where I created a logo, and branding materials. While I didn’t properly know how to make a good logo back then, I did improve a lot by coming back to this project this year and improved a lot of the materials and the logo itself. I usually design posters, or character artworks because that’s where I shine the best, but I love how these re-imagined branding materials that I created based on Frullati Cafe.