Restaurant Development + Design
By Amanda Baltazar
It’s easy to spend a lot of time on the signage inside a restaurant and drive-thru and ignore the front. That’s a big mistake, says Camillo. “It’s vital, especially for fast casual because you’re often in a strip mall and in competition with other brands,” he says. “Plus, strip malls are notorious for having landscaping between the restaurant sign and the road, and the most important thing is that the person driving by at 35 mph can read it.”
Abigail Plonkey, director of brand experience design, OZ Architecture, Denver, describes exterior signage as “the jewel to your design and a way to breathe life into your concept.” Because of this, she says it’s crucial that a restaurant’s exterior sign expresses the experience the restaurant will provide and helps it stand out from other signage.
Plonkey points to the example of Henley in Nashville, whose exterior sign features gold leaf and an image of a woman from the 1920s. “It’s a balance of masculine and feminine and is soft and opulent and fun and playful, which explains the brand,” Plonkey says. Plus, the gold “adds a little punctuation and sparkle to the side of an otherwise simple building.”
Wayback Burgers rolled out a new, cleaner logo, Conlin says. The colors of the new logo have changed. Red has been eliminated in favor of black and white, which stands out more, Conlin explains. The logo now adapts easier to signage “for maximizing the size of the sign based on different municipalities’ permitting requirements,” he says.
Logos are important because they’re easier and faster to read than a name, Camillo says. Operators should pay careful attention to the colors they use — blue is a poor choice because it’s harder for the human eye to distinguish. And of course, black and shades of black work really well.
Good logos do an especially huge favor for brands in strip malls with a monolith sign at the entrance listing all the brands in the mall. “Sometimes the only way to stand out is through your logo,” Camillo says, “and on that monolith, it can really help businesses who are tucked away.”