Le Cellier

A word-of-mouth wine bar and speakeasy inside the Novotel Yangon. Cosy, low-lit, and found rather than advertised so the identity had to work as a thing people describe to each other, not as signage on a street.

The wordmark is pictorial: the letterforms carry the act of uncorking, which turns the name into a small piece of theatre rather than a label. It’s the kind of mark that only works if the drawing is genuinely good, because there’s no strapline underneath doing the explaining.

The texture does the rest. Rather than reproduce a period style, the identity was built from hand-rolled ink laid, pulled and scanned, so every application carries the grain and slight misregistration of something physically printed. It reads as the building’s own history without ever quoting it directly, and it gives a small brand something a vector file can’t fake.

Client Le Cellier
Location Novotel Yangon, Myanmar
Scope Wine bar brand identity · Pictorial wordmark design · Print and menu design
Sector Wine bar and speakeasy branding