One of Western New York’s most anticipated new restaurants, The Grange Community Kitchen, is opening their doors for the first time this week. Owners Brad and Caryn Rowell have been carefully planning for this moment for a long time, and among the countless decisions they’ve had to make along they way, they entrusted the all-important task of developing their brand to Block Club. Now that the fruits of everyone’s labors are finally ready to be harvested, we’re equally as excited to serve up the first tastes of our work as well (all puns unfortunately intended).
As with anything else, it had to start with the name. In this case, naming the restaurant, located a few miles outside of the city in Hamburg, was a no-brainer since it was inherited with the space in a sense. The building once served as a meeting hall for the National Order of the Grange and, in fact, still bears the words “Hamburg Grange” prominently on the facade. The idea of the Grange fit in perfectly with Brad and Caryn’s vision on several levels—a community gathering location focused on local agriculture and the changing seasons—and so the name stuck.
After learning more about their overall vision, Block Club got to work developing their visual identity. Given the historic location, their aesthetic was leaning more towards a classic, heritage look, yet it was equally important to encapsulate the exciting modern edge that this dynamic team brings to the table (sadly, pun also intended). The results that we landed on marry all of these ideas together; history, modernity, nature, agriculture.
We applied a classic-feeling type treatment with tactile, old-school embellishments to modern, geometric letterforms and ornamented the typography with organic elements of sunlight and the harvest. All of this is set in a minimal palette of gray and gold, adding both an elegance and a lightness to the brand. Rather than creating one logo, we developed a versatile system of different lockups and marks in different colorways so that, regardless of the application, the identity will always look cohesive while remaining totally flexible.
There will be a lot more work to share in the future from this exciting partnership, but for now here are a few bites of physical brand collateral to hold you over until you can make it out to Hamburg to sample The Grange for yourself.