Blue Wave Seafood Restaurant is one of those projects the grew out of another completely different project. The design that this started out as (was intended to be) wasn’t really coalescing and it really started to look like it was trying to become a restaurant, so I let it run its course, nothing of the original design remains beyond the use of blue. Funny how those things happen.
Blue Wave Restaurant is an upscale casual seafood, steak and raw bar establishment featuring award winning service and an over-the-top bar.
As stated the identity for Blue Wave Restaurant grew out of another flailing design project. Originally, an architectural project it became more apparent that it would be better suited to a restaurant – a seafood restaurant in fact.
The name bounced around from AQUA (used to excess) to AZURE and INDIGO and other shades of blue, before settling on simply BLUE. The wave came about partly from the wavelike shape of the original exploration. A number of different wave types were explored from very simple strokes to intricate, wispy, grungy styles, to a stylized adaptation of Hokusai’s 1820′s “The Great Wave of Kanegawa” before finally settling down as a simplified wave line with a ‘body-surfing’ fish.
The simple, yet elegant elegant typeface chosen is an Open Type font called National Code Pi Std Lower Case. This was chosen for the clean elegant letter forms and the extremely loose tracking. It is complemented by a medium weight Futura Std (Open Type) for supporting text. The WAVE is used separately as a secondary graphic element.
The clean lines and sparse detailing is echoed in the restaurant’s stationery suite.
The service staff in the restaurant wears blue denim chef coats that are each embroidered with the BLUE WAVE logo, this detail is further carried through to the table linens to enhance the fine dining atmosphere in this mid-range casual concept.
To maintain consistancy of look, I have designed the restaurant’s menus with a combination blue denim and white linen cover, with a rigid plastic core. These covers are designed to be both stylish as well as durable and washable to prolong the usage life of each menu. The spring clips inside hold the menus, which are customized weekly and printed out on the restaurant’s computer. This saves costs over the long run by reducing the overhead of printing large volumes of menus and increases flexibility by being able to change menus on the fly.
