Case Study: Redesigning the Roaming Dough
During 2022, I worked with Suzanne from the Roaming Dough to evolve her brand, to reflect the growth she had experienced over the last four years.
I first worked with Suzanne in 2018; she was starting a street food business called the Roaming Dough, selling pizzas from a pizza trailer oven. Four years later, Suzanne’s business has grown from strength to strength; she now has regular pop up events, creates pizzas from a huge food truck and has taken on a commercial kitchen.
Suzanne approached me to give her branding an overhaul and refresh, as her businesses’ sense of brand and focus had matured over the years. She was happy with the original logo and fonts but felt it was quite serious so wanted the brand to show a sense of fun!
She needed a more versatile typography system, icons to represent her business, patterns that could be used as wallpaper backgrounds and a flexible toolbox of graphics for social media content.
The Process
Since 2018, Suzanne had relocated the business to Bedfordshire and had worked with a local graphic designer to try and evolve the brand. Sadly, Suzanne didn’t really like this work so didn’t use it. The designer had created hand drawn icons and a muted colour palette with shades of turquoise, mustard and lime.
I spent some time researching into other pizza and food brands; I looked into how illustrations and icons can work well, how to use typography to form patterns and how to combine icons with strong typography.
I was confident the brand needed vector based icons, a more lively and bold colour palette and a new typeface to create more energy. I agreed I’d work through the rebrand in the following steps:
- Colours
- Typography
- Icons
- Combination of all elements
- Brand guidelines
Colours
Suzanne did like three colours from the colour palette the previous designer created so I used these as a starting point but I added more saturation to produce more vibrancy.
I wasn’t sure how brave Suzanne was feeling so I created an intense palette, as well as a slightly softer palette. The difference between my two palettes was quite subtle but it gave Suzanne a choice to be slightly less bold!
I took the brightest colour palette and added the logo and it instantly seemed like the logo came to life.
Typography
I wanted in introduce a third typeface that paired well with Local Brewery and Abel but also had some character. The obvious choice was to use the script font that was part of the Local Brewery collection but I played around with serifs, sans serif and hand written fonts as well.
I merged my favourite fonts with the new colour palette and created some striking posters.
Icons
Pizza icons are fairly common so I thought it was important to design some icons that related to Roaming Dough’s logo and business. I added the pizza cutter to the truck to mimic Suzanne’s actual truck and I reused the highlight shape from the cutter to imitate hints of meat on the pizzas. I also paid close attention to the position of the stroke and adjusted the designs so the icons were as clean as possible when a stroke was added.
I then combined the colour palette, icons and my preferred typefaces to mock up some posters, as an example of how everything could work together.
Round Two
Suzanne’s feedback after round one was that she liked the bright colour palette and the sense of fun it created. She also liked how it popped against a black background but she was interested in seeing a colour palette that wasn’t based on the previous designer’s work. She liked the Local Brewery handwritten font but wasn’t sure if it suited the vector icons.
I started the same process as before and began with revisiting the colour palette; Suzanne had suggested neon colours and I settled on a new palette featuring shades of blue, purple and pink. I realised how bright this palette was, so increased the intensity of the original palette.
The new intense colour palette really made the original work pop.
I took the most successful poster and rethought the headline font.
I then repeated this work with the neon purple based colour palette.
Round Three
The project was paused for a number of months while Suzanne relocated; by the time we picked the project up again, Suzanne had decided she preferred the original colour palette but wanted to see all the slight variations together on one document.
Once we settled on a colour palette, I wanted to revisit the typography and explore which typeface was the best match for the two established brand fonts.
I took my favourite two typefaces and added them to the icon posters for Suzanne to make her final choice. In the end, she opted for the Local Brewery script font.
Brand Guidelines
My favourite part of this project was designing the brand guidelines, I really enjoyed working through the new brand elements and creating social media graphics, patterns and a loyalty card.
As the colours were so vivid, I made sure to include rules of how to use which colours in the foreground on different backgrounds.
Website
Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough budget for me to redesign the website but this is what I had in mind for the homepage! I really tried to bring the brand to life and use the icons in new and exciting ways!
Work with me!
You can see more of my work in my portfolio on Dribbble or read other case studies here on Medium. If you think I’d be a good fit for your organisation and would like to see what I can create for your brand and/or website, please get in touch by emailing me.
