Café Royal designed by Pentagram
| Author: Richard Baird | Filed under: Cafes, Bars and Restaurants, Logo Reviews | Tags: Bag Design, Box Packaging, Brand Identity, Brand Identity Reviews, Branding, Branding Blog, Branding News, Branding Reviews, British Design, Colour in Use: Pink, Design News, Design Reviews, Designed by Pentagram, Gold Foil, Graphic Design, Graphic Design Blog, Illustration, Logo Design & Branding Blog, Logo Design Inspiration, Logo Designs, Logo Opinion, Logos, Logotypes, Luxury Logos and Packaging Design, New Logo, Packaging Design Blog, Restaurant & Cafe Menu Designs, The Best Brand Identities of 2014, The Best Logo Designs of 2014, The Very Best of BP&O, Typography, Visual Identity Design Blog |Comments Off on Café Royal designed by PentagramOpinion by Richard Baird.
Once recognised as having the greatest wine cellar in the world and understood to have introduced French gourmet food to London, Café Royal, located on Regent Street, has been described as being the place for the avante garde to meet and dine for over a century. This year, to coincide with its reopening and reposition as a luxury five-star hotel and private members club, Pentagram, led by partner John Rushworth, was commissioned to develop a new brand identity that would reflect Café Royal’s history and its recent renovation by architect David Chipperfield. This went on to include packaging, menu design, stationery, bags and brochure.
David Chipperfield’s renovation, a testament to his modernist rigour and sensitive reinterpretation of historical material, ornamental features and colour, informed John Rushworth’s approach. The dual notion and disparate attitude of grandeur and history and a more recent architectural minimalism, is neatly resolved as five illustrations by contemporary graphic artist Kam Tang inspired by engravings and exterior architectural elements of Regent Street, and the Regency palette of Café Royal’s interior.
The illustrations, the foundation and defining character of Pentagram’s solution, are unmistakably retrospective in their reference and tie the identity very closely to the hotel’s local and environment, reflect its heritage and work well to foster and complement the perception of classic luxury. Yet these are executed with a sharp, vector-based contemporary polish. Drawn by Brixton-based graphic artist Kam Tang, a choice that in itself reflects a commitment to the more recent, these effectively utilise space and line density to introduce the perception of light, shadow and depth to flat artwork.
The traditional forms and ornamental flourish handle a computer generated line consistency and accuracy well and show an appreciation for the past but also a sensitivity to the contemporary expectations of refinement. The choice of reference delivers a mix of form, proportion and detail across all five illustrations which provide flexibility within the context of a variety of collateral shapes and sizes, from the square of the boxes to the slender frame of the door hangers.
Kim Tag’s work is enhanced by a good selection of high quality dyed papers that include subtle pastels and a brighter, confectionery appropriate pink across the boxes. Panels of flat colour, plenty of space, a good eye for layout and an interesting relationship and dissonance between type and illustration, sharing line weights yet differing significantly in size, have more of a current design sensibility.
The logotype mirrors the fine lines of the illustrations, adds open and square terminals and decent character spacing. These light details take a gold foil very well and leverage the established perceptions of high quality without appearing gratuitous. The radiance of the gold foil looks particularly neat across the uncoated, none-reflective and tactile surfaces of dyed pastel papers, and alongside the embossed leather of the in-room dining, directory and stationery folders.
Redrawing historic three-dimensional architectural detail with a precise and contemporary two-dimensional rendering technique is not unusual but one difficult to pull off without undermining the authentic, period aesthetic or the understandable value that can be achieved by effectively resolving the two. This is not helped by the many years of misappropriation, saturation and poor execution of filigree and similar, and the subsequent reduction in their effectiveness as a communicative graphic asset, often appearing in kitsch or chintzy contexts. To re-establish a relationship with the craft and quality of its past within a saturated contemporary context is confident. Its success really lies in its rendering, execution over good paper choices, a restraint when it comes to print finish and a neat contrast and variation in size and proportion throughout its application.
Design: Pentagram
Partner-in-charge: John Rushworth
Associate: Jane Plüer
Illustrations: Kam Tang
Project Photography: Nick Turner
Opinion: Richard Baird
Follow BP&O:
Feedly
Facebook
Twitter
If you liked this then you may also like:
Support BP&O
Thank you to everyone who has visited BP&O since its beginning in 2011. As many of you know, BP&O has always been a free-to-access design blog that seeks to offer extended opinion on brand identity work. It has sought to be the antithesis of the social media platform that often disentangles form, context and content. Writing articles can take 2-4hrs and are carefully researched.
I am passionate about design writing and believe that spending time to write about work, rather than just posting images, furthers design discourse. If you have enjoyed this article, have been with the site from its early days and would like to help contribute to its future, please consider supporting the site with a small PayPal donation. This will go towards the costs of hosting, CDN (to make the site quick to load) and Mailchimp, and cover some of the time it takes to research, write-up, format and share posts.