Pizza Delicious is an award-winning not-just-pizza joint in the Bywater run by local pizza gurus and long-time friends Mike Friedman and Greg Augarten. The restaurant started as a pop up several years ago and when they decided to setup shop in a converted Bywater warehouse, I was asked to help with their branding and overall aesthetic direction. Mike and Greg seem to attract a never-ending supply of talented and passionate people, and during the design and production phases of this work, I was lucky enough to collaborate with some of them.

Nat Kusinitz and I explored several directions for the logo, but none resonated with Mike and Greg as strongly as the the original Pizza D flier: Western-style letters drawn on a whim by Bud Ries in the early days when they were still a pop-up. So instead of using a new concept, I digitized and cleaned up the lettering then framed it with some art referencing the restaurant's warehouse location and the vibe of Piety Street and the Bywater in general.

I wanted the composition, palette, and imagery on the site to be driven heavily by the logo, while keeping it minimal, clear and intuitive for users.

Restaurant websites should have a basic set of high-priority elements – location, hours, contact info, and food pics (coming soon!) – but since Pizza Delicious' menu changes more regularly than a lot of restaurants, we wanted to make their up-to-date menu readily available.

One of my proudest accomplishments of this entire project is the way the menus work for Mike and Greg. My experience with restaurateurs has taught me that updating their website is often the last thing on their list, so ensuring Pizza D's online menu was up-to-date meant I had force them to use it somehow. The simplest and most direct solution was having them print the menus directly from the site, so they would have no choice but update it when they wanted to print new menus.

The tech behind the solution

A custom menu management system was built into WordPress so it could be easily updated and styled consistently, and the printer at the restaurant was calibrated to print a perfectly clear and crisp version of the online menu. For the part of their menu that stays the same ("Everyday Menu"), super-sharp, mobile-responsive SVG images are used so they not only look crisp and clear on every device but are also sharp in print. The rest of the menu was built using a combination of webfonts and CSS that also scale and print beautifully.

AWNING is a New York-based electronic folk duo comprised of Luke Smith and Jon Sheldrick, two of my long-time friends and collaborators. I love working with them because each of the projects starts with a set of guidelines and constraints, and for me, that really fosters creativity.

The artwork for each of their releases was designed using a process that mirrored the way the music was composed and recorded – AWNING often blends a mix of digital, synthesized sounds, and sounds that are recorded live (vocals or acoustic guitar, for instance) and then chopped up, layered, and effected. So when it comes to the design process, we might we start with a single image (or many source images) and cut it up, reverse it, repeat it, colorize it and put it back together. It's meant to be composed in the same way AWNING records a single vocal line or drum track and cuts it up, reverses it, repeats it, effects it, and puts it back together.

I'll often listen to the album over and over as I'm designing, trying to examine and internalize the subtleties of their work and translating into mine. I'll sit and hone in on the use of sonic color, transparency, repetition, glitching, ambiance, and texture of the tracks.

It's truly inspiring to transpose a creative process from one medium to another.

When I first moved to New Orleans at the end of 2008, I was hired as a prep cook at Boucherie where I learned a ton about food, cooking, and how to move quickly (well, quicker than when I was first hired, at least...). The restaurant had just opened its doors and was still in need of a logo and website so I volunteered my services. That design work turned out to be the first crucial link in my connection to the restaurant scene down here, a community that has offered a lot of professional opportunities since then.

Boucherie is a restaurant that evolved from a legendary food truck called Que Crawl (short for barbeque) but fondly nicknamed The Purple Truck by fans and staff alike. The truck is painted K&B Purple, so in the branding process, that became the obvious main color for Boucherie. The logo for the restaurant was to pay homage to the owners' bootstrapping roots, while implying a comfortable atmosphere, elevated Southern cuisine, and a tip of the hat to Cajun, New Orleanian, and French culture. After exploring several different styles, we landed on what you see here.

This WordPress installation features a custom menu management section that allows Boucherie to update its menus easily, and allows the menus to be searchable and styled as close to the printed menus as possible. The menu pages, as well as the rest of the site, are built with responsive design principles to allow for accessibility on any screen size.

The images featured on the site were taken by the talented Claire Bangser.

Boucherie asked me to design two different business cards for them: one "mini card" for customers to take away with them, and one for the owners and management to give out in more one-on-one situations.

The mini card is more playful and uses a pig silhouette drawn by one of the owners, James – an image that was also carved into the gable of the Creole Cottage in which the original restaurant was located.

For the higher-end cards, I worked closely with local printmaker and letterpress expert John Fitzgerald to create some beautiful, debossed, heavy-gague cards.

A simple sign was created for Boucherie on Jeannette St, and when they moved around the corner to Carrollton Ave, we upped the ante slightly, adding extruded letters and making it out of a sturdier, thicker material. OPA Signs & Graphics was tremendously helpful in executing this newer sign.