Completed items!

Over the last week we've started receiving some of the stuff we're making! We are starting to tick things off the list, like FINALLY!

We ordered stickers, stamps and our business polo tees.

This is our polo tee, our logo is embroidered in. The only problem is that the colour of the word 'Lemon' is off and it's not our yellow. We needed to use PMS colours but we only used CMYK. This was also because the place we got this made didn't give us any choice or options. We just uploaded our jpg and that's it. 

This is our company stamp, which is our secondary logo. This is what we will use for any necessary documents or stamps for our paper bags.

This stamp is our lemon stamp which will be used for our loyalty cards.

This is our company sticker, which is our main logo.

Packaging Mock Ups!

We've been doing some mock ups for our packaging just to see the mechanics of it, how it folds and how it works. We've just been printing it on normal paper just to get a feel of what it will look like. Here are a few examples,

Originally we didn't have any imagery, but after the feedback last week it was suggested that maybe some imagery will be good and it will entice the customers more and be more inviting. So we played around with imagery and also the colours of the lid and the actual box itself. We were pretty happy with how they are looking. This is the burger box. Now the next step is to print on stock that we would actually use for our final product just to get an idea of what it will be like. 

We've bought 220gsm paper to try it on, we've also bought a bone scorer to help us with the scoring. 

This is the progress so far on the packaging side of things.

Update!

Everything is coming left, right and centre. There seems to be so much to do in so little time, so many problems that creep up every time we think we've found a breakthrough and every path we take seems to have an obstacle for us to try and hurdle. But with all that being said we think we are still on track and getting things done.

So this week we all got some feedback from our lecturer regarding the work we've done so far on the menu, style guide, packaging and website.

Menu

The feedback was that the idea we had of using the other colours from the colour palette was going away from our brand of being clean and simple and really using just two colours to push our brand forward. So instead of adding more elements into this brand, we should try to improve and move forwards with what we already have. The insides of the menus were good, but the covers just needed something different. So that's what will be worked on over the next week.

Packaging

Packaging is going well, we have a design direction that we want to go with for the packaging. After the feedback, it was mentioned that maybe we should introduce some images of food, because right now our brand has no imagery and it would be a good idea to bring imagery of food into our packaging. So the task was the explore ideas on how we can bring imagery into our packaging. We would like to keep the concept we have now because we think it works really well, but we will keep playing around and trying different ideas.

We are also going to be sending napkins and coasters off to be made really soon.

Style Guide

Jasmin has had some troubles with layouts in InDesign and she got some much needed help today. Before, we had most of the content just that the layout wasn't there. So with the help of our lecturer we have a new layout which also brings in imagery into our brand and with that foundation, we can now continue with the rest of the style guide.

We have also been sourcing stock images for our style guide and even website. We were planning to take our own food at the start, but we realised we just don't have the time to do that and also food photography is really hard to get right. If the lighting and composition isn't right then it wouldn't look very good. So we decided to save time and just use stock images

Website

For the website we are going quite well, user testing has been done and work has already started on customising the website. The first step is putting all the content in we are already well into that. On the timeline it is planned be finished by week 11 but Jeanel has said she could have it done by around week 9! So if that's the case she can jump on over and help us with the print designs.

Changing our colour palette!

With some discussion our group decided that it was best to change our colour palette,

Previous

Current

As you can see, we've changed one colour in our colour palette. It's the green to an turquoise bluey colour. We changed it because while working on the menus and having the different colours as the covers, we realised that the green wasn't a very nice colour and also another thing was that it didn't sit well with our yellow. Especially if the text is yellow and the background is that green. So we changed it to it's current colour, which is a lot fresher (which is one of our values) and also much nicer to look at and sits well with the yellow. Plus it's a colour that definitely sits in well with the rest of the colours in this palette

Menu update!

There has been good progress with the menus, after hitting some obstacles last week, it's kind of gotten back on track. We have pretty much changed our direction of the menus.

The insides of the menus are now more standardised, as such:

Drinks Menu

Main Menu

This is basically what the inside of the menus will be, unless there are some drastic problems, this is pretty much what the inside of the final menus will be.

Specials Menu

This is our specials menu, it is just a single piece of paper, double sided. This will be the same size as one fold of the main menu and it will be given to a customer tucked inside the main menu. On one side of the specials menu it will be our Lemon & Pepper specials and also our combos that we have at our restaurant. On the other side it will be a little competition/community involvement thing for our customers that we mentioned in the previous post about a "brand hook", just to create a customer base so people will keep coming back. Having this printed on the specials menu will be our way to promote this competition and with this little competition it will also bring the website into play. 

Still undecided if we should have a majority of the text as our Fenway typeface or change it to Open Sans cause it looks a bit hard to read. 

Menu Covers

So when I mentioned earlier about taking a new direction with our menus, we were thinking about creating a more completed look between all our menus instead of having different styles. Previously our drinks menu wasn't going to have a cover, (it was just going to be a triangular stand with the three outfacing sides with the content on it. But now we are changing that and having a cover on it as well. How we are designing the drinks menu is still unsure, this will be mentioned later on in the post. 

So for the menu covers we were thinking about something like this,

Here are just different ideas, for the covers.

1) For the main 'L&P' Menu, that will be the cover of the Z-fold.

2) for the specials menu, it won't really be a cover as it is only one single page, but the layout on the top will be the same, just that there will be text (shown earlier in the post) on the front page. 

3) The drinks menu will be a different size to the main menu but the cover will be the same design.

Drinks Menu Design

We thought about a way to have this drinks menu on the table that is a bit different. The one we had before was a little safe. So we thought to have the three sides of the menu, on three separate pages and put them all in a sleeve, (shown below is a template of the sleeve) and put a hole punch in the top corner or both of the top corners and use some string to keep them together and also it could act as a thing to pull the menus out of the sleeve. So the design just above will be the design on the sleeve.

We are still undecided on this idea and are still looking for other ideas to have this menu. But this is what we have so far even though we aren't fully happy with it yet. 

Style Guide update

So Jaz has been working on the Style Guide, we were told the layout of the style guide was getting a little boring and repetitive from the style guides we've done in the past. So Jaz's job was to come up with something different and explore other layout formats we can have. Over a few days a few other designs were created and it is definitely looking a lot better and fresher than what we had before. Here are some concepts that we will run through our lecturer to get some feedback on but we are quite happy with a change that was definitely needed!

So far we really like the concept where the heading is at the top, on top of the dotted line with the page number in a banner sort of thing and a block on the left for the text or "description" of whats on the page. I think this layout works well and gives us a lot of space to work with. We want to try and keep all the text on the left within the box and the rest of the page acts like one big page across the spread.

So far all most of the content for the style guide is done, it's just a matter of finalising a layout. So we are on track with that according to the timeline that we just created! We might even finish earlier, which will definitely be helpful.

A hook for our brand?

We realised that we need a hook for our brand to stand apart from anyone else. What we are doing now is good work and there's nothing wrong with it but there's no "wow" factor and that's what we need. We had an idea of community involvement.

The idea that we had was to use an Instagram hashtag, maybe #lemonandpepper and every month we would have a competition where guest would take pictures of our food or restaurant and hashtag it with that hashtag and the people who post the best three photos for the month will get a free meal or something like that. This can be incorporated into our Instagram feed that will be on our website and the winners will have their post pinned at the top of the feed.

This competition will also be promoted through our specials menu, it will be on one side of the menu so that this competition will get exposure.

We still need to talk about this as a group.

Getting everything back on track!

We were told that we needed to plan our time and have a timeline with deadlines. Because now we aren't working of a proper timeline and because of that we haven't really given ourselves deadlines and we are just taking our time with our work and finishing whenever we do. So Delvin created a timeline for the team, here's the link to it,

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dnfn7fR8cKuto7T2nOII74lVuCE2VNoM-RozSNJuJzk/edit#gid=0

After creating the timeline we realised we are short of time and basically for the rest of the project it will be quite packed. We need to do a lot of things. We will have print runs as that's the best way we think we can approach it, as we need more time to work on some of the things and can have them printed a littler later, then we also have packaging things that we need printed so we can make them ready for photography then and photoshopped into a mock up. Thankful that we realised this earlier.

Advertising

Originally advertising was in the highly desirables, but now after we sat down the our lecturer we NEEDED to have an advertising campaign. Our lecturer took us back to basics and made us find the core of this project, the what, why's and how's. We realised that the main aim of the project was the build brand awareness for our new restaurant, so that means having to do some sort of public campaign in order to fulfil our aim. So this adds one more thing on the list to do.

So now here is a list of to-do's for our group. Listed in priority for each of us;

Things to do:

Jeanel:

• Get feedback from Andrew
• User testing
• Look/Feel of Website
• Show group for feedback and refinements
• Start customising/building website

Dut:

• Find a place for napkins to be printed
• Continue packaging template designs
• Show group designs for feedback and refinements
• Design Coaster (that’ll be quick)
• Figure out stock of material
• Send napkins/coasters off to be made asap

Jaz:

• Create new style guide layouts
• Find stock images (establish photography rules)
• Start filling out the rest of the style guide (colour palette, etc)

Delvin:

• Change Menu colour/alignment
• Explore layouts (current one is too safe) 
• Continue with rest of the menus

As a group:

• Gather ALL print information
• Quantity/Size/Stock - ask about scoring based on stock
• Talk about brand hook/community involvement
• Discuss Packaging guidelines for Style Guide 

Sooner rather than later

So we kind of had a wake up call and roadblock at the same time. Suddenly everything seems to far to reach and a little too impossible to accomplish. But we are just thankful this stage has hit us in the 3rd week of our trimester instead of the 8th week. Now we've hit this huge obstacle we can start working hard now instead of realising how much trouble we are in a few weeks down the track. We realised we are short of time. Without realising, we actually now have a lot to do and little time to do it in.

Problems left, right and centre

Today we showed our menus and style guide to our lecturer and the feedback was mixed. Some of the things were good but some we needed to work on. For the style guide we were told that the layout was too safe and overdone. We need to explore other ideas and layouts and be more playful. It was basically the same for the menu, it was said to be too safe as well. 

Style Guide

So some of the pages in our style guide will be taken out and instead of adding more categories in the style guide we were told to space our the information on the pages a little more. So instead of taking more pages we with more content, we should use those pages and space everything out so every page has lots of space to breathe. We also established that we needed to create guidelines for packaging as well, so we have gone and made a list of things we need to determine for packaging. 

Menu

For the main menu, the colour we had chosen made it seem really dark and unfriendly, as opposed to our drinks menu where it's white and it looks a lot better. So we were told that the dark background wasn't working. We need to make the menu bigger so it didn't seem so cramped, basically giving more space as well. Also we need to decided between either centre align or left align and choose one of them because right now the main menu and drinks menu are different. 

Packaging 

Packaging is going well, we have templates to work with which makes everything easier. We got into contact with the printers today and asked about the printing. 

Printing

One of the most tedious things or processes is probably getting everything ready for print. Because we have so many things (different things as well) to print that we need to consolidate all the information for the printers, because if we all contact the printer separately with our own information it would be confusing for them. So we need to collate all the information such as the quantity, size and stock of the paper. There are lots of questions we need to ask the printers though and it all just seems a little harder when the printers aren't very good with keeping good communication. 

Recap

At the moment we are all hard at work in our respective areas,
Delvin - Menu
Dut - Packaging
Jaz - Style Guide
Jeanel - Website

Things to keep in mind...

So as we are progressing, there are a few things that have come up that we need to keep in mind. 

1) the material of our packaging

2) Stamp and sticker sizes so we can get them off to print as soon as possible (this will be done by the next few days) so we can get that out of the way. 

3) In the style guide, we need to find out what sort of guidelines we need to include for packaging and menu side of things.

4) For the website we are still waiting for feedback from our lecturer.

That's it for now! Everything seems to be up to date and running smoothly.

Menu update

There has also been good progress made on the menu. As mentioned in one of the earlier blog posts, it was a little bit of a struggle to find a starting point. But now we have established what we want and what we need. We have came up with the food items that we will be selling and the types of menus we will be having.

So we have decided to have;

Main Menu

Which will be given to diners when they come in to eat. We were thinking to have a folded menu (bi-fold or z-fold) as we think in compliance with our restaurant style, a traditional open book style menu isn't suited for us.

Drinks Menu

This will be placed on all the tables, like a table top menu in the shape of a triangle. It will be left on the table at all times.

Specials Menu

The specials menu will just be a single sheet of paper (maybe laminated), with the various specials and promo deals that we have. This will come with the main menu when the diners come in.

Takeaway Menu

This menu will simply be printed on a piece of paper so people can take it away with them, this will be displayed at the counter.

Menu Design

So initially we made a few different concepts, here are some of the concepts Delvin created. The first few were meant for full pages, maybe like a 4 page spread? Maybe on A4 size paper. We tried a few different ideas like using columns or centring the text, tried a few different colours for the text and also played with having the pattern as a border. 

At this point we tried a totally different approach and decided to go with the z-fold idea. Also with the z-fold idea we incorporated some icons that could possibly break up the text and add a little bit of fun into the menu. Also a z-fold seemed like a good idea because obviously a z-fold has 6 pages and that suited nicely with the different types of foods we have. 

From the previous ideas above, we did like having the pattern border around the page, but seeing as we are going for z-folds it would be hard to put the border in as well as there wouldn't be enough space and it would make the menu seem too cramped. So reluctantly we had to ditch the idea of the border. 

This is the drinks menu, although it's definitely not completed yet, but here is basically what it will look like. Still unsure of the colour of the background, there can be a few minor changes. But as mentioned before this will be a triangular menu which will sit up with these three sides facing out. We will separate the juices and cold drinks as the juices will have quite a lot of information so it will need a page of its own. 

Not 100% decided but this is what we are going for with the menu at the moment. Having the little icons on top of each page. Also this isn't an A4 as all the content couldn't fit on one so we had to make it a custom sized paper. We added the pattern to the front/cover page to keep that consistency with the rest of the brand. 

There obviously needs to be more work done on it such as filling out all the information properly.

Menu Food Icons

When creating the menu we thought it would be a good idea to at some sort of imagery to the menus as it was getting a little dry with just text. When it came to having images in our menu we also had to be quite selective in terms of what sort of images we needed. We thought that having real images of real foods would not suit the style that we are, we also did consider having full bleed images for the background and again, it just didn't suit our style. In the end we decided to try cool little animated icons using our primary colours of charcoal and yellow. Here are the icons we have for each of the different food items

Packaging Update!

Dut has been working hard with the packaging, progress is slow but we are definitely moving forward. We all knew packaging was always going to be tough, not just for finding places to make what we want but having to find templates ourselves and making some of the things ourselves. Also designing it can be tough as well as we need to know exactly how the package folds and if we get confused about the different sides, we could be designing it totally wrong! So this is what we have so far, we started looking at burger and pizza boxes.

So here is a concept we thought about using for the burger take away box. We did try to print it our on normal paper and just trying to fold it out and see what it looks like. 

Here are a few concepts that we have started creating for the pizza takeaway box. Dut has played around with a few design concepts and we are still in the process of deciding what looks better. We want to incorporate the pattern and use it subtly. About the material that will be used to the packaging, that still hasn't been 100% decided yet. But it will definitely be one of the next things we bring up at our group meeting. 

As mentioned before, packaging is definitely the toughest part of this project. So once a few of us have completed with our parts, such as the style guide or menu, we will definitely we helping out.

Style Guide Update!

We have made great progress on the style guide thanks to Jaz! Everything seems to be going smoothly. Here are some screen shots of bits and pieces of what we have so far,

Most of the information is in there already, right now the main focus is probably the layout of of the first few pages as they are a bit trickier. But the bulk of the information is in there already, all that's left is probably the more tedious things like establishing minimum sizes and spacing. 

For the cover pages (the pages that are black now) we were thinking about having half black/half (horizontally) image pages, just so the images can provide a little bit of colour other than black and yellow to break it up a little and also instead of having full image pages we wanted to keep half of it black so it saves us the trouble of trying to find images that will allow the text to be seen over it, so to solve the problem we thought to have a fill colour so the text can be easily seen. 

Website Update!

So since the last post, we had chosen a theme from that initial list. The theme we have chosen is called 'The Flavour'. We feel that it will suit our style very well and it will definitely work well with a website that made for a restaurant. We did try and implement what we have and want in our website into that theme/layout and it works well. It has everything we need it to have. Here is the link below to see a demo of the theme we have chosen,

http://themeforest.net/item/the-flavour-restaurant-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/8295484

So after we had decided to use this theme, the next step was to start wire framing our website to fit this theme. Jeanel has created the first wireframe quite quickly which we were happy with the progress since we had stumbled a bit already with this website. Here are some screen shots we have of our wireframe.

We haven't done any colour or look/feel yet. This is purely just the wireframe of what the structure of the website will look like. Jeanel we will now be showing this to our lecturer for some feedback and if all goes well then Jeanel will start on the look and feel by implementing colours. 

A Side Note

We realised that we have only been using two colours from our colour palette in our designs. So we felt that it was suitable for the website to have all the colours, because a website gives us more ways to play with colour and still look part of the brand. As for the print material it was really hard for is to try and find a way to incorporate the rest of the colour palette.

Website Issues

So just as we think that everything is going relatively smoothly, we hit a road block.

After reviewing the wireframes of the website with our lecturer, it was brought to our attention that the grid layout we had originally had wouldn't work because having three columns running across the page, there would be issues with the most right column and the whole general functionality of it. So basically we had to go back to square one and start all over again with the wireframes.

Seeing as the website is one of the things we need to be completed soon, we were just short of time with the website. So as a group we came to an agreement that instead of building a website from scratch, we would buy a wordpress theme and customise that. This would quicken the process and at the same time still produce a high quality website. Instead of spending time building the actual website we can just use a theme and spend that time to customise it exactly how we like and add more features to it. We thought that we be the smarter option and better way to invest our time.

Jeanel has went to find a few wordpress themes that would be appropriate for our restaurant, the group will go through the list and pick which one we like most and then Jeanel will make a wireframe based on the theme we have chosen. Here are the themes we are choosing from:

http://demo.themefuse.com/?theme=theflavour&device=desktop&_ga=1.71171864.943585980.1433812797

http://demo.cmssuperheroes.com/Wordpress/wp-nuvo-modern/

http://themeforest.net/item/tavern-pub-restaurant-brewery/full_screen_preview/11172316

http://themeforest.net/item/hg-restaurant-responsive-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/9910041

http://themeforest.net/item/hungry-a-wordpress-one-page-restaurant-theme/full_screen_preview/10398557

Picking up where we left off!

So we are back after a bit of a break! Half way through with this project and although we are on track with our timing we still feel like we are behind.

We are now starting on the menu design, that is our main priority for now. While work is ongoing with the website, style guide and packaging.

Style Guide

We will be starting to properly do up the style guide, before we kind of just put in a few bits and pieces into the style guide, but now Jaz is assigned to work on the style guide and starting to put all the information in as it is one of the next things we need to have finished in our timeline.

Menu

So we are starting to come up with Menu concepts. Delvin has been assigned this job. At first it was a bit of a struggle to find a starting point. So we first wrote down the content for the menu, for this we just went online and searched for normal dishes you would find in a restaurant and also adding a few of our own. With all the content finalised, we could start exploring with the layouts. Now, it's just a matter of coming up with different ideas for the layouts.

We also did some research on the theory behind menu design and the psychology behind reading a menu, so we will put that into consideration when designing the layout. 

Packaging

Originally we were going to concentrate on packaging a littler later on, after we've finalise everything for the menu. But after the struggles of finding places to produce our packaging items, we realised we might need to make some of the packaging ourselves and that means learning about die-lines and knife-lines so we know how to create things such as boxes and cardboard carriers. So we thought to get a head start on the packaging side of things and Dut will be taking charge of this.