Assignments Restaurant is a restaurant ran by the culinary department at the Art Institute of Colorado. In the recent past, they had seen a decline in the number of diners who came to their restaurant, so the culinary department enlisted the help of the design department to boost sales.
As a part of collateral design class, each student was instructed to design a new logo and a menu for Assignments. All of the logos were presented to the director of the culinary department and several of her colleagues, and they ultimately decided to move forward with my design.
Design Thinking
Because the restaurant has limited printing resources and they were going to be the ones updating and printing the menu each quarter, I strictly only designed using black and white and constrained the menu design to an 8.5” X 11” piece of paper.
The restaurant changes the menu quarterly and with the seasons, so I designed four templates for them –one for each season. Each season’s menu features artwork of leaves, flowers, and trees that are all native to Colorado during each season.
The students running the restaurant each quarter are in a restaurant management class, so the “staff” is constantly changing. While in the class, they are learning how to prepare and serve food in a fine-dining setting. Keeping that in mind, I designed the overall look of the design to be simple and elegant. However, there is also a sense of rustic-ness to the aesthetic. This is to appeal to the younger restaurant-goers in the Denver area, in hopes to boost sales of the restaurant.
