Seeking flavor champions

Year:: 2021
Industry:: Consumer

(Services)

Intro

In a market saturated with fast-casual options, gusto! stands out in Atlanta’s dining scene with a menu featuring super fresh, healthy ingredients and flavors inspired from around the world.

As the brand prepared to expand in locations beyond the city’s in-town neighborhoods, we helped gusto! bring some order to its brand identity.

Visionary and founder, Nate Hybl established the brand on the principle of living every day with verve and curiosity and wanted to ensure the spirit of self-discovery wasn’t lost in transition. We helped focus the brand on his founding idea of celebrating the sharing and daring journey of discovering bold and flavorful food.

This idea diffused into the entirety of the gusto! brand, from personality-filled messaging to bright and clear visuals.

Rather than starting from scratch, we used elements that showcased the restaurant’s existing equity — clean typography, Gusto! gold, and an exclamation point — to refine the already well-established identity. By giving clear guidelines on layout, whitespace, rule of thirds and hierarchy, we helped gusto!’s in-house team create a scalable visual style for the menu and ordering process.⁠

We expanded the brand’s core color palette to include a range of blues and gray. This way, each gusto! restaurant can select a core palette suited to their location while remaining in line with the master brand standards. Some locations rely most on gusto! gold, white and black, where others will incorporate blues.

A secondary palette corresponds to each menu item. Hues were inspired by an ingredient from each dish. These colors infuse a vibrancy and energy to the brand in highly expressive contexts.

The addition of line drawings, emoji-like illustrations, and a variety of colorful bursts give gusto! a strong bank of visual assets to guide guests through the ordering process. Photography guidelines help tell a visual story from product to people, with images that are bright, crisp, and genuine.

Further refinements to the gusto! identity include messaging that’s as genuinely friendly and welcoming as the restaurant itself, with tonal guidance that helps verbals flex up or down, depending on context.

We collaborated with and trained the gusto! team on how to utilize this updated identity, ensuring they felt confident and excited about implementing the new look in established locations and new restaurants coming soon.