Sow Row
Fresh, in one continuous line.
Brand Identity · Art Direction · 2021
- Role
- Context
- Team
- Timeline
- Tools
A restaurant that sells appetite first
Sow Row is a restaurant concept that serves healthy food, built as a three-week studio project at Istanbul Bilgi University. It covers the whole identity — mark, type, colour and pattern — and everything a customer would meet: the menu, the packaging, the uniform, the street campaign and the website.
Healthy food is usually branded with the same few signals: a lot of white, a leaf, a salad bowl seen from above. They say "good for you" before they say "good", and side by side they are hard to tell apart. Sow Row leads with appetite instead. Its posters say "Savor the flavor" and "Where every meal is a celebration", and the line that comes closest to health, "Eat well, live well!", still puts eating first.
One bird, drawn in a single line
The wordmark and the mark are the same gesture: the tail of the "w" lifts off and becomes the bird. There is no secondary lockup and no simplified version, because the mark already works at every size it needs to.
The name is set in a heavy italic with soft corners. The weight keeps it legible from across a street, and the lean gives the word the same forward movement as the bird. The first clip runs the wordmark through three of its colour pairings: cream on deep green, coral on peach, navy on pink. The second steps through the alphabet.
Warm on paper, bold in the street
Six colours, in two halves. Deep green, navy and teal are the grounds: they carry the mark at billboard scale and make anything warm placed on them glow. Coral, blush pink and cream do the close work on menus, cups and stationery.
Most of the campaign follows one rule: one ground and one shape, taken from opposite halves. A navy croissant on coral, a coral heart on teal, a pink glass on deep green. The rule is simple enough to give a printer or a sign maker in a sentence, and it still makes a series that never looks the same twice.
Circle, leaf, diamond — recomposed
Three tile motifs recombine into a quilt that never repeats the same way twice. It gives the identity somewhere to go on a large surface without ever needing a second logo.
Next to the pattern sits a set of food icons, drawn in the same flat, rounded shapes as the bird: a croissant, a slice of pizza, an apple, a glass with a wheel of citrus, a basket of bread still steaming, a heart. A poster can be about one thing on the menu without needing a photograph, and on the billboard the icons gather around the wordmark like a menu you read at a glance.
From a facade to an apron
Applications were the real test. A mark that only works on a business card is not a system, so the final proportions were decided by the billboard and the poster wall, not by the letterhead.
The bird also works as a frame. On the pink poster it is cut from a photograph of a dish, and in the portrait it stands as tall as the person eating, so the mark sits in the same picture as the food instead of in a corner of it. The apron carries all of it at once: the wordmark across the chest, the bird across the middle and a band of pattern at the hem.
The same warmth, backlit
On screen the deep green becomes the ground and the food becomes the colour: dishes photographed from above in round frames, with a blush wave closing the first screen. The pattern is left off, so the photography can do the selling, and the pink underline beneath "Yummy" is the one flourish the type is allowed.
What three weeks added up to
One mark, one typeface, six colours, a tile pattern and a set of food icons. From them: a menu and stationery, cups and cutlery sleeves, stickers, an apron, a billboard, a poster series, a street kiosk and a website. None of it needed a second logo or a simplified mark, which is what drawing the bird and the name as one gesture was for.
What I'd do next
Take it off the mockups. Everything shown here is a mockup, and the next test is physical: the pattern printed at apron and wall scale, to check that the tiles keep their edges, and the deep green on uncoated paper, where dark colours lose the most.
