Case Study

Client                         Los Andes Bakery

Project Title             21 years = New look

Duration                    1991-2011

Description:   The objective was to create a new look for the family owned business. After 21 years running, the family felt as if it is time for a new look. There are 3 different locations to Los Andes Bakery; the first one being in Sleepy Hollow New York, the second one in North Bergen New Jersey, and the third one in Peekskill New York. Los Andes Bakery is a Chilean shop where not only pastries and bread are sold, but also sandwiches and traditional cultural food and drinks. The owners Jessica and Francisco have worked very hard over the years to keep the place running and appealing to customers. They’ve realized that their website isn’t up to date and they want to take the chance to start from scratch to update it. By taking this class I hoped to help them out and learn how to create logos.

Each bakery is designed differently depending on their locations. The first one in Sleepy Hollow, New York is an average size, and it has the most Chilean items because of the neighborhood. The second one in North Bergen, New Jersey is the biggest one. It’s located in a very known street due to the shopping areas around it. And the third one is more “Americanized” it is located in Peekskill, New York. They sell more varieties of food and pastries.

The original colors of the bakeries are blue, white and red to represent the Chilean flag. But they don’t like to use it as their website colors. They are very into artisan things. Each bakery has wooden tables where the bakers make the treats. The Peekskill bakery is basically all made out of wood; from the window borders to the big sign out front which the owner made himself.

Research

 I spent a lot of time looking up different types of mountains located on the Andes Mountains range in Chile. I found a good set and had to look up how to make the vector look as realistic as possible. Then I got to thinking on how to make my advertisement. I looked up how to make an image looked like wood on illustrator and a lot of results came up. I learned how to use the warp and twirl tool. Which gave the wood effect a little more real. I also looked up wood carving to get the colors I wanted and I was pleased with the results of that.

Strategy

I thought that since the bakers work on wooden tables and the owners like artisan wooden designs, I’d make the logo and business card look like wood and make it seem like the mountains and business name is carved into it.

Challenges

The most challenging part of this project was definitely trying to make the business name and mountain vector look as if it was carved into the “wooden table”. I tried looking up things online how to make a vector look as if it was carved into wood on Illustrator CS5, but the only results I would get was how to make type look as if it was carved into wood on Photoshop.

I had to play around with the tools a little to figure out how to do things and where to place them. Originally I planned on having the mountain vector put in the middle of the entire table and put the writing on top of it, but then that looked too sloppy. Then I wanted to place the logo on the top right side with the circle and everything but it didn’t look carved enough and the wood looking effect was getting blocked out of it. I took a break from the vector and started playing with the fonts. I really liked Zapfino so I wrote everything with that font. Then I realized it doesn’t look “carved” enough. So I looked for other fonts that looked a little rugged to give the effect that it was chiseled by hand. I found one called Papyrus and liked how it looked. To make it looked a little carved and popping out I changed the gradient and changed the opacity of the top image and dropped the same image to the bottom to give it the effect I was looking for. On my original mountain vector I had a full mountain with trees at the bottom. I didn’t like how that looked when I changed the colors to put on the business card and logo so I removed all of the trees and bits and pieces of the mountain.

 

Results

Over-all I was really pleased with what I got at the end. It took me a while, but it was worth it. I started off with a completely different idea in my head but something just switched off in my mind that turned out for the best. The clients were also very pleased with the ending results and are planning on making my business card idea into their new ones.