Chinchillaquiles: Project Development Process
The Problem
What: There’s a growing need for workspace outside of home as many people are working remotely post-Covid but staying in one’s room all day isn’t great for productivity. Café’s hesitate to stay open after 5PM most days of the week, and even then many fail to foster the atmosphere for staying and getting work done.
Who: This issue primarily affects everyone who’s jobs got stuck being fully remote or hybrid after the pandemic let up. Students, people with jobs in tech and design, as well as many office employees were hit with the brunt of this.
When, Why & Where: Post-Covid (now) is the when, but the why gets more into what happened during the pandemic. See, when everything shut down, most people were required to work from home. For a short time, on-site work was very limited to the jobs that really needed it. After things finally started to quell, a lot of people in school and many workers were shifted to fully remote and hybrid work. The phenomenon has gotten so great that these became fully viable search options on job search sites. Alas, this means a lot of people spend a lot of time in their own homes.
Identifying an Angle
Personally, I had just gotten back from a trip to Mexico (where I visited my fiancée) when this project came along. I was still very excited about some of the food I had tried and was questioning why more Tex-Mex didn’t have more Mex. It’s really good, and this is coming from someone who hated Mexican food growing up. I was all about sushi and green tea flavoured icecream…and crumpets. I miss crumpets…
Sidebar aside, I needed to work this project into two separate niches at the same time: a solution to the above presented problem, and a Mexican restaurant to represent my rudimentary Spanish-speaking skills in my portfolio. After some discussion with my fiancée, I landed on the concept of a Mexican café.
Research & Decision Making
I looked into existing Mexican restaurants in Texas and found bright colours, chunky wood-print style typography, and very similar menu options. The only one that really stuck out to me was a place called Chilaquil. They had recently opened a restaurant at The Pearl which is a high-end hangout space in downtown San Antonio. They had started as a food truck and finally were able to cement themselves into a foodcourt. What was noteable was their logo and colour choices. It was pretty sleek and limited in palet; however, the restaurant itself didn’t carry with it the sense of “chill workspace” I was hoping for. This sent me into looking at café’s. Starbucks, Voodoo Espresso, Dutch Bro’s, and eventually…I Love Churros. This place could use a re-brand all on its own, but in spite of that it had the atmosphere I was looking for. It was a café that served food, coffee, and would let people sit and work for hours. A lot of Spanish-speaking families and individuals would come in and spend time there, hold little birthday parties and some people would even meet there to perform job interviews. I knew I needed to take those two restaurants and mash them together into the perfect storm.
Parameters
My café needed to be a café/restaurant. The atmosphere needed to be comfortable and inviting of the long-term individual whilst not requiring those with short-term stays to feel unwelcome. It needed to be family-friendly but not too childish. Lastly it needed to be understood by both Spanish and English speakers as this would be theoretically located in Texas.
Name, Voice, and Tagline
After a lot of ChatGPT prompting, editing, and back-and-forth with my fiancée, I ended up with the name Chinchillaquiles. It would be a challenge to do this from a typographic standpoint; however, the name just made sense. Chilaquiles is a traditional breakfast dish consisting of fried tortillas, refried black beans, salsa, and topped with créma and queso fresco. Chinchillas are cute, family friendly, and the word is spelled the same in both languages. Merging these together made for an adorable pun that worked in two languages.
The tagline was much more difficult. For a while it was “Comida, comodidad y comunidad” otherwise translated to “food, comfort, and community.” Eventually that tagline slid to the valuable backburner for later use and a more fun and approachable one came to mind “Chill with some chilaquiles” with its translation being “relajáte con unos chilquiles”.
Content, I moved forth. The tagline set the tone, fun and inviting with a slight skew toward Millenials and Gen Z.
Visual Identity Development
With all of my baseline information established, it was time to start working on the visual identity. The logo needed to read as a cross between modern and the Mexican restaurant stereotype (thanks TexMex) and it was going to be rough thanks to the long-worded nature of the business name.
Thumbnail Sketches
The quick and dirty nature of these concepts was plenty for me to get all of my ideas onto paper. Whether or not they worked was besides the point.
I took the ones I liked and proceeded forth into digitisation…
Roughs
After pulling the ones with the most potential into illustrator, I began roughing them out and refining them.
A lot of toying went into this process, and it was entirely difficult.
Finally, after several iterations I landed on a final logo mark and brand identity I was content with. And just like the rest of my process, my file looks a mess but says a lot.
