First Logos from Matt Stevens. 10.18.11

Matt Stevens is a brilliantly talented illustrator and designer. I can't really remember when I first heard about him, but the moment I saw his work, I knew I wanted to work with him. And the work speaks for itself. We are lucky to have him as part of this project.

We didn't stray too far from his original ideas. He had two very strong ones from the jump...and we essentially just mashed the two together. The result is what is on the home page of this blog. 

Beyond the logo and brand ID stuff, I wanted Matt to become part of the overall concept design team. I am really looking forward to see what he comes up with for signage, menu boards, apparel, etc. 

Naming Ideation 9.15.11

Lots of thought goes into naming things, especially restaurants. Naming things are a pain in the ass. With a hot dog joint, It was really easy to get too cute and the next thing you know, you wind up with "Uncle Wiener's Big Dog House...Home of "Fido" the Foot Long" or something awful like that.

What we were trying to do was to formalize the process and exhaust every option, good or bad. We had a few rules: No dog references, no references to the male genitalia, and no baseball references. Everything else was fair game.  As you can see, some of us couldn't help "going there." In the end, we ended up where we began.

We wanted something catchy, with two repeating one syllable sounds that were consonants - which is why the working title of the project was JJ's to begin with. 

Coincidentally, there are a lot of "J's" in my family. Me, my dad and my kids' names, for example. So there is a personal connection of sorts. Really, we just wanted the place to be easy to remember.