One of our latest clients is Maggie Ogunbanwo who runs a small culinary business called Maggie’s Exotic Foods as well as cafe in Penygroes, North Wales. She got in touch with Mint Factory in order to redesign her logo, create web design and products labels. At first all sounded perfect to us; however I quickly understood that this job would be very demanding.

Very restricted design

Maggie occurred to be one of those clients who are much attached to their long lasting branding. When it came to logo redesign she still wanted to keep the same idea she went for initially many years ago. This approach brought a challenge to me and made the design process very restricted. Maggie wanted to keep all the elements of her existing logo ( image below), so the earth globe, pot, steam and flame needed to stay on the new logo.

The base to start with didn’t give me much of a choice. At first, I was terrified with this a century old logo that was unrelentingly staring at me with those chunky thick lines and odd mixture of colours. When I first saw what I’m going to work with, a big glowing red question mark appeared above my head…

Understanding the client is crucial for the design process

I needed to understand why Maggie believed as much in the existing visual identity of her business, that she wanted to keep it even when redesigning. I got to know Maggie’s Exotic Foods better as well as Maggie herself. I quickly realised that Maggie is a wonderful, warm & welcoming person that is full of passion for food, cooking and people. She likes bright colours especially red and green.

The key elements of Maggie’s Exotic Foods are:

• Home made
• Natural
• Exotic Flavours
• Passion
• Colourful food and spices
• Innovative combination of recipes from around the world
• Experimental
• Fun
• Fresh
• Tasty

In this context the globe and pot started to have more sense to me.

Why not a crest looking logo?

The research was done and I knew there was no way I could create a typography based logo for this project (the kind I like the most). I needed to put together all of the elements (pot, globe, flame & steam) along with a company name.  On top of that, it had to be colourful, welcoming, modern and visualize Maggie’s passion for cooking.

To be honest I didn’t start the design process immediately as I needed to wait for some inspiration. I cannot remember when and why I first thought of creating  clean looking logo for Maggie, but I went for this idea instead. This is how I did.

Web design and labels for Maggie’s Exotic Foods

When logo was in place, we created web design and labels well. Because logo is very busy and colourful, we decided it had to be a key element of all the rest marketing materials. So we made it stand out from the rest of the designs.

web design

labels design

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