James Beard award-winning Chef Vivian Howard turned to The Door to help build awareness for her Williams-Sonoma product line, forthcoming cookbook, and the 4th season of her documentary series “A Chef’s Life.”

With even more to come for Vivian, she needed a distinct brand identity to unite her efforts and communicate her unique perspective on food and community. The Door worked with Vivian to develop a logo and visual identity system.

We then applied that aesthetic to a new website to serve as the singular online destination for all of Vivian’s endeavors, including pages for her restaurants, PBS show, cookbook, biography, online shop, and blog. Take a look at the website here.

Shortly after the launch of her Door-designed website, James Beard Award-Winning Chef Vivian Howard and husband/business partner Benjamin Knight started work on their third F+B concept: a Neapolitan pizza restaurant destined for Wilmington, North Carolina.

The Door established a bright and playful visual identity that cues the Italian nature of the menu while conveying a contemporary and playful spirit. The identity’s wide range of ingredient, pizza, and plated-dish illustrations expresses a rustic yet considered interpretation of Neapolitan cuisine.

The Door then applied the visual identity to numerous restaurant collateral items and managed the production process to ensure the Benny’s Big Time Pizzeria visual identity was carried through to every guest experience touchpoint.

Five years after opening, Vernick Food & Drink had gained widespread recognition as an outstanding culinary destination. Greg Vernick’s 2017 James Beard Award for Best Chef Mid-Atlantic only fueled the urgency to elevate the restaurant’s identity and collateral to the same high standards as their cuisine and service.

The Door redesigned the restaurant’s visual identity, paying particular attention to the menu suite such that the design approach would not only accommodate the restaurant’s daily menu invention process, but celebrate it. With that identity approach and menu system established, we then applied those principles to takeout packaging, exterior signage, and service uniforms.

Sullivan St Bakery and its founder, Jim Lahey – James Beard Award-Winning Outstanding Baker – worked with The Door to refresh the bakery’s visual identity and expand its range of identity assets.

After updating the logo to improve legibility and communicate the bakery’s New York City heritage, we developed a full identity system with ownable typography, layout, and pattern elements.

The Door then redesigned the bakery’s full suite of food service and brand collateral, and managed the production process to bring every application to life.

The Little Beet is a fast casual concept launched in New York and founded with one simple philosophy: to serve real food deliciously.

The Door was tapped to partner with the restaurant’s operating group and celebrity chef Franklin Becker to develop the look and feel of the brand, as well as the in-store touch points, all focused on inspiring customers to embrace the local, seasonal, and natural elements of the brand.

Once that visual identity was created, The Door initiated a wide reaching marketing and public relations launch campaign that has continued over time to include additional locations and brand extensions, including a fine dining version of the concept.

The Door worked with Melt Shop owners to reposition their brand, previously a grilled cheese fast casual restaurant, to an artisan sandwich concept encapsulating a wider range of menu items.

These changes came in the form of an updated visual identity, on-premise touch points, and
packaging, all of which were showcased to the media and consumers through new store openings and aggressive public relations outreach.

Graduate Hotels operates in college markets across America, celebrating each unique town’s local culture and history.

The Door was retained for public relations services to represent the launch of the brand on a national scale. The working relationship quickly expanded to include all branding and design work for the first location’s food and beverage offerings in Tempe, AZ.

The internal branding team at The Door, along with the firm’s design partner, created the brand style guide, logos, business cards, menus, website, collateral items, and signage in addition to consulting on the uniform style and menu items for Graduate Tempe’s two restaurants – Tapacubo, its Mexican street food concept and the hotel’s diner-chic restaurant, The Normal Diner.

Béarnaise, located on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., is the third restaurant concept envisioned by Chef Spike Mendelsohn of Top Chef fame. More importantly, it was his first true dining concept, having previously launched successful fast casual restaurant brands.

The Door was tasked with helping embellish Chef Spike’s vision by creating a sleek and sexy French bistro that allowed him to showcase his culinary pedigree in a venue that needed to look and feel far different than any other restaurant he had established.

From the menus and logos to the postcards and matchbooks, The Door created a memorable brand package that helped Chef Spike achieve his goals — and the marketing and public relations campaign instituted allowed him to share that brand with his international fan base.

When longtime client, award winning chef Marc Forgione, decided to create a pre-batched Bloody Mary mix he tapped The Door to design the physical elements of the brand to tell the story of this new product.

Once the mix was right (22 batches later), The Door partnered with a team of designers to begin work on the look and feel of the bottle and overall brand positioning. In this process, bottles were selected, logos created, tag lines written and websites launched.

As the world’s largest economy hotel chain underwent the biggest transformation in their history, The Door was tapped to announce and promote the redesign. We proposed staging an installation showcasing Super 8’s collection of kitschy hotel art and giving it away for free during the busiest weekend of high-end art fairs in New York City (May 2016).

The Door was tasked with the entire implementation of the concept, with our Design House developing the visual identity for the event and designing the promotional collateral, interior space, website, and every consumer touchpoint throughout the experience. The Door’s public relations outreach resulted in more than 883 million media impressions within days after the event.

Riding on the success of the exhibition, we brought the event to Miami in December during Art Basel. We raffled-off a new batch of hotel art in the artsy Wynwood neighborhood while an instructor from the Bob Ross estate offered free painting classes.