A complete visual identity and menu system for a plant-based restaurant in Warsaw — from logo and illustration through to a bold wall menu, bilingual wipe-clean table menus doubling as placement mats, and print-ready production files for launch.
Logo development — the three-stage evolution from rough silhouette to refined outline to the final coloured mark, showing how the rooster's character was built up incrementally before moving to vector.
Character studies — exploring the range of rooster forms, from naturalistic to stylised, to find the right level of abstraction for a restaurant logomark.
Construction grid — the final logomark geometry mapped to a proportional grid, with the Vietnamese/Polish colour logic annotated alongside.
Final logomark — the Uwolnić Kury rooster in its primary dark-ground application, with the tricolour tail echoing the Vietnamese flag and the Polish rooster folk tradition simultaneously.
Botanical illustration layer — the archival botanical and produce imagery developed for the wall menu background, setting the visual register for the restaurant's plant-based identity before a word of menu copy appears.
Wall menu — the complete three-panel layout combining the botanical illustration layer, typographic hierarchy, and menu content. Designed to be readable at three metres and function as the room's primary visual event.
Installed — the wall menu in the restaurant, showing scale and legibility from the dining area.
In context — the menu as décor and ordering system simultaneously, with ambient restaurant lighting.
Polish table menu — the placement mat format at full production scale, with the full menu hierarchy compressed into a wipe-clean surface that doubled as the table covering.
English table menu — identical in layout and format to the Polish version, ensuring the system worked for international guests without any visual compromise.
In use — the table menu as placement mat, on the restaurant's actual tables. The wipe-clean lamination and compact format solved the spatial constraint of small covers while keeping the full menu visible throughout the meal.
Pho — the restaurant's signature vegan pho, photographed overhead to show the complexity of ingredients that the menu copy and illustrations needed to communicate.
Desserts — mango and pistachio, one of the three dessert options the menu system needed to present clearly within a highly compressed format.
System in context — the table menu visible beneath a bowl of pho, showing the placement mat format working exactly as intended: food, menu, and table surface as a single designed experience.
Logo, typography, and colour palette — designed to communicate the plant-based concept boldly and function consistently across print and digital contexts.
The restaurant's primary visual focal point — bold, readable at distance, and designed to function simultaneously as décor and ordering system.
Compact, wipe-clean, bilingual — designed to carry the full menu within the constraints of small tables, in Polish and English, from day one.
Custom hand-drawn illustrations in Procreate — giving the menu system warmth and character, representing signature dishes across all printed materials.
The wall menu had to do two jobs at once — make the room, and make ordering effortless.
— Design brief, Uwolnić Kury Restaurant Brand & Menu System, Warsaw, 2020
Starting from the name — Uwolnić Kury, "Free the Hens" — and working outward. Sketching logomark concepts in Procreate, exploring how to translate the restaurant's playful, political character into a mark that worked at every scale. Developing the colour palette and typographic system to carry the same tone across all applications.
Creating custom food illustrations in Procreate — hand-drawn to reflect the restaurant's handcrafted character and give the menu system warmth that photography alone couldn't provide. Illustrating signature dishes and motifs that would recur across wall menu, table menus, and supplementary brand materials.
Designing the wall menu as the primary visual event — balancing bold hierarchy, illustration integration, and maximum readability at distance. Then adapting the system into the compact table menu and placement mat format, solving the spatial constraint of small tables while maintaining the same visual character in both Polish and English.
Leading material selection — paper stock, lamination specifications, and finishing for each deliverable. Preparing print-ready production files for the wall menu, table menus, and placement mats. Ensuring the design's colour accuracy, type clarity, and illustration quality held up through the print process and practical daily use in a working restaurant.
Taking a restaurant from name to fully operational visual identity — logo, illustration, colour, typography, and every physical touchpoint — within a single engagement. This is the complete arc of brand design: understanding what a client's name and concept mean, and making that meaning legible to strangers walking through the door for the first time.
Designing for a restaurant is not a screen problem — it's a spatial one. The wall menu had to be legible at three metres. The table menu had to fit a small surface and survive daily wipe-downs. The bilingual system had to feel native in two languages. These are constraints that require thinking about how people actually move through and experience a physical space, not just how things look on a screen.
Custom food illustration in Procreate — not sourced, not adapted, but drawn specifically for this restaurant and this menu. Demonstrating that illustration is a brand tool as much as a decorative one: the hand-drawn quality carried Uwolnić Kury's artisanal, values-led character in a way that photography or iconography simply couldn't replicate at this scale and budget.
Open to senior in-house roles, design consultancy partnerships, and long-term freelance or retainer engagements — particularly within Europe.