The Bashford Local

After running themselves ragged in the demanding Toronto culinary landscape, husband and wife chefs, the Bashfords, decided to pack up their things and move out to the Ottawa Valley to pursue their dream of owning their own restaurant with a focus on fresh, local produce.

'Rustic' is the word that kept coming up in conversations about the identity design for this project. The Bashfords wanted a simple palette. After toying with some brighter colours, we settled on this dark grey with blue undertones that I sampled from a photograph from an old chalkboard I had laying around the house. 

They wanted to look clean and modern, but inviting. They said they wanted some swirls but not too many. I ended up doing a lot of custom illustrations, taking them into Adobe Illustrator and modifying them, always simplifying to make sure that scaled printing was never an issue.

After spending some time drawing some of the items on their menu, I decided to incorporate simple illustrations into the brand’s menu and stationary designs. This added to the "local" vibe of the brand and gave it some fun elements that could be carried throughout the design of the collateral. 

While the Bashfords continue to work on bringing their dream to life, I wanted to share this work-in-progress as we are all very pleased with the outcome thus far.