Stack ’Ems Burgers
Fast Food Restaurant Visual Brand Identity Design
The Client
Stack ’Ems is a fast-food burger restaurant that prides itself on its burger stacking prowess. The restaurant offers a famed ‘triple stack’ burger and presents itself with a playful, retro vibe that can appeal to both younger audiences and fans of traditional US Diners. In order to capture the essence of the business I would have to combine modern aesthetics with nostalgic, traditional visuals of the famous American fast-food industry.
Design Vision
The design vision for the project centred around this playfulness of creating the largest stack of burgers possible; the typography and adornments, therefore, would be presenting this idea of stacking adorned with iconic visual elements of vintage US Diners and fast food outlets.
Creative Decision Making
Art Style: A staple of traditional Burger restaurants is the checkered adornments. This visual cue for most people will immediately identify a fast food establishment, especially when represented in red. An obvious go-to trend here is to create a cartoon mascot to represent the brand, this is something I hoped to avoid, but I did still want to incorporate some burger imagery. With the stacking theme in mind, I opted for creating burger images with stacked typography and patterns filling them. This simple idea proved invaluable for creating a logic to design decisions.
Typography: The title font is bold and playful, its impactful without being aggressive with an edge of funkiness. This is the font I chose to represent the idea of over-stacking burger patties and it works well as a stand-alone or partnered with a casual script font. It also works well to stack and this idea gave balance to the primary logo when working with the rather awkward apostrophe wasn’t working out.
Colour Palettes: Red and white is an instantly recognisable tradition of fast food restaurants and on this occasion, I chose to adhere to the trend with it being this strong. I did, however, add a contrasting blue shade into the mix, which completed a modern rework of the red, white and blue of our American inspirations. This blue acted as a pivot for the colour palette, and when replacing the white and red with white gave an inverted look in print applications.
Logo Designs: The primary logo simply brings together all of our elements and USP of the brand, a stacked burger bun of our title and checkered line patterns. It looks good, conveys the narrative and is balanced, no overthinking was needed. As alternatives, some circular versions of our checkers were designed along with different typography layouts of the key brand details. These could be used for stamps, stickers and adornments.
Implementation
The brand’s identity and logo suite was boldly stamped onto print menus, stickers and marketing materials in what was ultimately a simple implementation. Where possible, typography and illustrations were stacked and completed with a seeded bun and a playful nature was applied to imagery and copy. The logos being either square or circular in composition meant that they were easy to use and uncertainty was removed in application.
Results
The result is a bold, exciting and simple brand identity which doesn’t overcomplicate its products. It’s a burger restaurant and it’s not trying to be anything else. With a very simple idea that they make burgers one patty higher than other places a whole brand narrative can be adapted and personality has exploded from a very simple idea onto menus, stickers and packaging.
Conclusion
With fast-food restaurant brands, there is a lot of room for playfulness, stickers, rustic packaging and the casual nature of the dining but when a business has a particular product or USP like Stack ‘Ems does it can focus all of that energy on a theme and become something really memorable. Some things which are overdone still work and red and white checkered patterns on burger restaurants are one of those things. You just need to make sure you’re showing some personality elsewhere when using design trends like this.