More than a decade ago, we were commissioned by a new client to develop a fast-casual Indian restaurant concept, from its inception. The client's prior experience had been in manufacturing and distributing packaged Indian foods, and he was now looking to branch out into the restaurant industry, modeling the brand after concepts like Chipotle and Qdoba. Having developed one other quick-service concept to that point, we understood that the approach to be taken for this type of venue would need to be very different than that of a full service restaurant, for many reasons, and in many ways. A main differential is the importance of the brand's image, from the name, to the logo, marketing attitude, and all elements of the store design itself. A successful approach is a wholistic one, where everything that the customer will encounter leads them back to a center point. In blogs to follow, we will explain more our involvement in naming the concept, developing the logo, our experience in the brand's marketing, as well as the actual store design. Here, we will focus on one aspect of the design, the murals.
With this particular brand, we felt that it was important to detach from any potential stereotypes that could be assigned to the brand, prematurely. There are known associations that even our client recognized, that could create an unapproachable vibe for the Western audience, if we were to utilize some of the more commonly seen and used elements of what makes something "Indian". The client had some ideas prior to our involvement, and even some name choices, but we wanted to strip it all down, and start from scratch. We did a considerable amount of research into the culture, most of it visual, to be able to create a relatively simple store design, while capturing some sense of what would indicate to customers that this would be an authentic Indian experience. One of the ways that we expressed the culture was through a series of custom designed murals, inspired by some of the images we had encountered during our research. Below, you'll see some of those inspirational images, as well as our initial sketches, and a few of the murals that were ultimately installed into various locations. We created these murals both by hand and computer, and sent them to an artist, who would then project our art onto the walls, and hand paint them - some of which spanned 2 stories in height. As you'll see, the look of the murals evolved, as did the design of the stores.
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| mural sketch |
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| mural sketch |
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| first installed mural |
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| last mural installed |
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