Background
Juicebaby smoothie bar and health food restaurant is a newly opened shop on the King’s Road in London. They focus on bottled, unpasteurised cold-pressed juices, also offering smoothies, snacks and desserts with an emphasis on organic, gluten, dairy and egg-free produce.
Their aim is to create a healthy, grab-and-go food outlet serving fresh and nutritious plant-based items. Creating only natural products, Juicebaby promote a diet high in raw, unprocessed food and drinks that provide the best nutrition, whilst being easy, accessible and delicious. Essentially, they are the answer to an increasing demand for healthy fast food, which can be consumed on the go.
Objective
As a newly started business, they had no existing logo design or brand to speak of. In a competitive industry, their brand could literally make or break them. With the Juicebaby image being a focal point of their products, they hired Inkbot Design to create a full brand identity for their newly opening London store in 2014.
Requirements for the logo design set out in the brief, was that it should be “classic meets quirky”, “straightforward” and “creative”. Visual contrast with the produce, especially the colourful drinks in the bottle was important – working both in black and white was key. Finally, it was to be “gender unspecific”, with a fairly broad target audience being considered.
Outcome
Passing through quite a few iterations before arriving on the final logo design, various aesthetic and conceptual directions had been explored. Once the symbol had been created, we both knew it was ‘the one’.
The logomark itself symbolises a very simple premise, yet can be understood in a variety of ways. The ‘core’ idea is that the leaves in the centre represent growth or life, inside of the outer form. In other words, the natural, life or energy inside the fruit, inside the bottle, or inside the consumer once they’ve consumed. Leaves are easily associated to organic, natural products, yet this doesn’t push them as the most important form or over-emphasise them conceptually.
Typography complements the organic and playful mark, with a font appropriately entitled “Fun City” for the logotype. It’s rounded ends keep things personal, with it’s geometric and balanced look overall a level of professionalism is retained in the overall design. Complementing Fun City, is a secondary typeface called Azo sans which was chosen becasuse it was: “full of nuances that soften the strictness of pure geometry, making the typeface more human and pleasant to read in longer body text, while maintaining a sober and rational appearance.” It is used on labels for body text and works well in a justified and well-spaced form, even down to the smallest scales like on the 250ml bottles.
Talking of labels, a full set of various dimensions was required for the square bottles. A large 500ml template was created, that could be adapted downwards to allow for consistency through the different sizes, without simply downscaling in which the logo would be presented in varying sizes on the shelf. This template allowed for additional labels to be produced efficiently, keeping the style, layout and scale reliable throughout the products.
