Discovery
To create a new identity that was true to Tokyo Joe To create a new identity that was true to Tokyo Joe Sushi, we had to extract the key pillars of the brand — What was the culture? What was the voice of the brand? How did customers feel after interacting with the brand? With these questions in mind, we went back to the restaurant one more time. And to our delight, they were just as welcoming and friendly as we remembered. When we returned to our desks, we noted down all the words we would use to describe our experience at the restaurant and prioritized a few of them based on category.
By the end of this exercise, we narrowed the brand attributes down to these five words: Loving, Joyful, Easygoing, Welcoming, Energizing.
These attributes served as the foundation and guidance for every decision we made in this project.
Understanding Customers
Once we gained a better understanding of Tokyo Joe Sushi’s brand, the next focus was on its customers. Who were they? What were their personalities? What did they love? What did they hate? What were their hobbies, preferences, goals, and needs?
To distill all the information, we created a customer profile to represent customers that could frequently be found at Tokyo Joe.
Visual Identity
With the brand attributes and customers’ needs nailed down, the next step is to decide the visual direction.
We created two stylescapes, each with a unique visual approach, to capture the feel of the visual identity. One modern and slick, the other traditional and premium.
We eventually decided to further develop based on the first approach, because it better captured Tokyo Joe’s joyful and easygoing feel. Then a few traditional Japanese visual elements were brought in from the second approach (such as the pattern and clouds) to deepen the connection between the brand and Japanese food culture.
Once we finalized the visual direction for the identity, it was time to start on the specifics of the visual identity, beginning with the logo. With the brand attributes and stylescape in mind, we experimented with different typeface and layout combinations, along with multiple approaches for the logo mark.
The final logomark and logotype were reached after multiple rounds of exportation and iterations, striking a balance between being modern and traditional.
The logomark was a circular stamp combining the characters 東 and 京, which was Tokyo in Japanese. Each letter of the name “Joe” was also hidden in plain sight among the strokes of these characters.
The colour palette was developed to reach back to the root of Japanese food culture while also appearing clean, joyful, and energizing.
Website Refresh
As the first stage of designing the website, a site map was created to map out the user journey while also keeping note of what content was featured on which page.
We then mocked up the pages with wireframes, displaying the layout of each page without the details and distraction from images and colours.
On the home page, we highlighted options to easily order pickup and delivery, followed by Featured Dishes and Customer Reviews — two important sections for driving new customers in.
Once the site structure and page layout were in place, we moved on to filling in the images, colours, and visual elements.
The stylescape, as the master reference document for the brand's visual identity, came in handy at this stage.
