Notes on the Origin of Visual Identity

Since we're briefing out first professionally engaged photographer, I figured I should write this down.

Because my influences in fashion are limited to whatever one ex was watching on ANTM, here's the sort of work I'd refer to as inspiration for Sudo Brew's initial colour palette.

The market for hipster cafes was predominantly "black out", or "wood and steel" rustic, so I wanted to go full white-out, but there was within the same six months a whole slew of white-out F&B (46 Gibraltar, Nara's, etc. etc.) so I went with technicolour, finally.



I mean, I set out with this direction in mind, but we haven't moved interior decorations much beyond the primary colours for the most part as of a year into operations. (Most recently I’ve been thinking about putting black & white photography over the RGB pastel walls in order to provide farther contrast.)

Also to complete the brand's visual identify origins:

• the black on white logo was conceived at the stage twhen I wanted to white-out the colour scheme (minimalist yes, but there's too much black stuff in the world already, plus to some degree perhaps... the girl I was dating at the time at a thing for white)
• the font is Helvetica Narrow Bold, which is from MUJI 無印良品生活研究所's font (Sudo's market positioning follows Muji's to a certain degree)
• the Sudo Brew and Sudo Coffee logos are modeled after Star War's logo and Japanese written symbols (SW is itself a clone of Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress)... because our first target market were computer geeks who are typically into this sort of literature