Graphic Design - Level 6

Intro Paragraph - The East Village is a small, friendly and relaxed cocktail bar in central Hyde Park, Leeds. In an effort not to hinder the ambience that its customers have come to expect, the bar tries not to advertise itself too much. Students in the area go to The East Village because of its intimate atmosphere, high quality yet affordable cocktails and events such as live music and quizzes which take place fairly frequently. This rebrand of The East Village’s visual identity, inspired by the classic dive bars that the venue itself takes inspiration from, gives them a more contemporary identity, matching their student based demographic, whilst still retaining the cool and friendly atmosphere it has worked hard to cultivate.   Brand Guidelines - The star logo mark, inspired by vibrant American dive bars acts as a single signifying form throughout the whole visual identity. The star is evocative of the evening/night setting that the bar is open and the atmosphere and buz...

From here all the other aspects of the visual identity came rather intuitively. I think when you put in the time to create a succinct and well rationalised brand identity, after that if you’re just creating fairly simple products within it, it shouldn’t be too hard.   One thing that we were keen on creating was the banner which showed the different ‘Classic Cocktails’ on the menu. I worked on this. I went through a few different ideas of how to apply the brand identity to it once I’d typed up the chart in the typeface we were using ‘Montag” on a black background. A lot of these had good ideas, such as the 4 different colours of the brand being the 4 different sections on the chart, but ultimately it become a bit too convoluted. We ended up favouring a simpler chart with the star in the background. Thinking about the application of this banner, and what space it would inhabit in the real world, it would be in the back of the bar, therefore it would be nice to show the star very...

We were very happy with the final logo we created. Reading through the brief again it does highlight how the branding should be simple and succinct - a basic idea applied effectively throughout the campaign.   We were also happy with the idea for the application of this visual identity; The bar itself wants to remain fairly low-key and not over advertise itself, yet it is still a dive bar inspired, vibrant little venue. So the solution we created was to have a bright and vibrant logo, yet when being advertised in public, the name and details of the bar do not appear, making it a bit more secret and exclusive. This is reflected in the posters we made for advertising in public which simply show the star logo and nothing else. We picked for colours for the branding; red, orange, green and dark blue - the large selection of colours matches the vibrancy of dive bars, inspired by the colours of neon signs.   The other set of posters we needed to creat...