One Fish, Blue Fish for Miyabi Japanese Restaurant

Most of the people who hire Design Kompany work in professional services. So it’s always a treat when someone comes along who just likes our process, and wants to try it out. Miyabi came to us because they really wanted to establish themselves as a family-friendly Japanese restaurant. (Most of their customers were people visiting the just-next-door Toys R Us.) It was important to nail the brand message first: “Fun, delicious, and quirky.” Handy, too, that Akira is a native speaker of Japanese. (I’m medium. I’ve passed for Japanese once or twice in telephone calls. Always a hoot.)

Here’s the original post.

A Japanese restaurant asks DK for a logo, menu, and business card design.

Creating a Japanese restaurant’s brand identity

A Japanese restaurant in Tukwila area asked us to design a new brand identity when they realized they wanted a change. They’d been in business for a while, but wanted a new image.

Still, Miyabi wasn’t 100% sure what story it wanted to tell through the rebrand and design for the new look.

Here’s a restaurant menu sample page:

Japanese restaurant menu and logo design by Design Kompany

We also created a series of ads to run in local hotel directories, and Japanese-language telephone directories, too. We made a Christmas postcard with this design, too, which was a lot of fun!

Original post

Here’s the new brand Design Kompany made for the Japanese restaurant Miyabi.

Miyabi's New Logo

This is the business card design. Design Kompany came up with the total brand image: a custom typeface for ‘Miyabi,’ custom illustrations, the color palette, and the typefaces to pair with the new logo.

At first the owners of this Tukwila restaurant thought they might like a sleek, Japanese bistro look that would be upscale and posh.

But after talking with Design Kompany, it became clear that “young people looking for a fancy date spot” just isn’t Miyabi’s target audience.

Families come here. Local regulars. And business folks who happen to be in the area, which is near Sea-Tac airport.

“After going through [the questionnaire] with you guys,” Miyabi co-owner Hisako Shirakura said, “we realized we want a look that says ‘we’re fun.’

“We want people to know they can come here and have a nice time. And… we want to surprise them.”

“Quirky, in other words? A little… off-center?”

“Exactly!”

So we brought to the team Design Kompany illustrator Aaron Barker. “I was really enthusiastic about working with Design Kompany on a sushi restaurant’s logo,” he says. Aaron drew the fish and created the font for “Miyabi”.

I tried many ’style’ concepts, from sketchy pencil to crisp vector graphics, abstracted letterforms to kawaii, or ‘Japanese cute.’ I’ve spent a lot of time around fish my whole life, visiting aquariums, commercial fishing… And in high school I even took a workshop with the famous fish illustrator Ray Troll. –Design Kompany illustrator Aaron Barker

Keep an eye out for more from this up and coming artist, who sometimes signs his drawings “Aaron Bee.”

New business cards came out at the end of 2006.

Also check out these Miyabi holiday postcards.

Miyabi Holiday Greeting Card

Miyabi Japanese Restaurant

Also see related work:
D+A Studio business cards
Write with Meaning business card design

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DK in 20 seconds



Welcome to Design Kompany.

We exist to help you realize your fullest potential as a small business, using dialogue as a key tool to discern your clear, authentic brand message.

If you value thoughtful conversation, accuracy, and exquisite solutions arrived upon through solid design thinking, you might like DK.

We've done naming, branding design, and message design to help people express a strong core identity. But it has to be based on passion. Smaller companies are a great match for DK, because we love talking marketing and strategy with those owners, whose values and affinities often set the company culture's tone.

We work remotely with people anywhere in the world who are: aware, awake, curious, and respectful of the design process, which we think sets the stage for great design when done well. Talk to us! We're listening. -Dipika


Things we like to write about? Travel, art, architecture, museums, and cafes. Design, materials, design thinking, but more than anything else, process. We like to say, "Trust the process." It really makes a big difference if you start with a fresh page, and think together with us on where and what you can become.

Trains are good, too. Small comments on parenting, or what other people are doing, and what other people are saying about creativity, and the creative process, and a shift from the industrial way of thinking towards more free-form association that jogs new waves of thought --- all of that is DK's beat.

Plus we'll write about people we meet, things we learn, and all the cross-cultural and multiple dimensions of interpretations. We have another blog getting going just to consider dialogue design.

But to make this blog easier to sift, here are the topics we're slotting our blog posts within:

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CONTACT DK

Design Kompany is in Durham, NC.

PO Box 1512
Durham, NC 27702
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