Gemma’s Cucina Italiana

Italian dining in Nairobi’s Westlands, built around a character rather than a cuisine. Gemma is a painter who found her calling in a kitchen and having invented her, the work had to actually show her.

So the centrepiece is a painting, not a photograph: a woman in an ochre dress suspended horizontally in a blue sky, wine glass in hand, dress falling in Renaissance folds against flat cartoon cloud. Unmistakably a joke, and unmistakably serious about its own craft.

Around it the system goes old-world an oxblood script logotype, arched frames, checkerboard borders, engraved vignettes printed one to a coaster so a table setting becomes a small collection. Four colours and no more: oxblood, cream, sky blue, sage. The sky blue only ever appears as sky. That one rule is why the illustration reads as a window rather than an image pasted onto a layout.

Client Accor / Novotel
Location Nairobi, Kenya
Scope Restaurant brand identity · Logo design · Illustration · Menu design · Signage design
Sector Restaurant and F&B branding