Swan Street Diner is the latest addition to the roster of restaurants, shops, breweries and distilleries located within the Larkinville district. When we started working on this project last year, the space where the diner car now resides was an empty lot. Leslie and Harry Zemsky approached Block Club to come up with the branding for the diner and we couldn’t be happier with the result.
My first thought when we started this project was to avoid the obvious and stick to creating a custom wordmark. Looking to the past I was inspired by a lot of old diner imagery, hand-painted signs and neon lettering. I found that this was an opportunity to combine a customized script with heavy deco letterforms that were based off of photographs of the old diner cars. The colors and patterns add to the retro vibe of the diner setting, but their use with the marks give the space an up-to-date playfulness. And when we stuck a soda jerk cap on the swan, it became one of the proudest moments of my designing career.
I’m looking forward to the continuing expansion of creativity in Larkinville and all the flapjacks the Swan Street Diner is going to serve up.