Yeah! Meshi, a design journey
Hi, I’m Kaho, the visual designer and illustrator at Cookpad. I’d like to tell you about how I developed the new Yeah! Meshi branding.
The Yeah! Meshi Brand
The team wanted a re-brand of the initial design, they needed visuals that would better represent their vision and be instantly appealing to customers. When I got the brief, my initial thought was, “how do I make the new visuals more familiar and authentic to people in Indonesia?”.
Design Process
Phase 1 : Interview
My design process starts with an interview of the team to gather as much information as possible about what they are trying to achieve.
For Yeah! Meshi, I needed to find out what kind of service was being offered, who the customers were, the key messaging and what we needed to communicate. The stronger the ideas and the more knowledge around service I have, the easier for me to translate and create the visual language.
Phase 2 : Research and Mood board
I’ll then start researching images based on the ideas, concepts and keywords gathered from the interview and put them together on a mood board. Usually, 2–3 different visual languages could be communicated.
For Yeah! Meshi, I created 3 mood boards for key themes and showed to the team. One was dropped, so I developed the initial designs from 2 themes: Fresh and Caring.
Direction 1 : Fresh
I chose one colour for the logo to keep it simple, with no added extras, to create a style that communicates quality and no added chemicals. It’s really important that customers know the food they are buying is safe to eat!
Direction 2 : Caring
I wanted to illustrate the superior quality of the food, as well as touching on the emotional advantages of buying meals prepared by our home cooks. I also wanted to highlight the beauty of imperfection as this food is real and not manufactured to a specific template by illustration. I chose a more vivid colour palette for this theme, with chilli red and warm orange which are inspired by Indonesian foods.
Phase 3 : Feedback and Update
The Yeah! Meshi team liked both directions so I decided to combine them. This lead to the final branding of Yeah! Meshi. I drew new illustrations that more accurately represented Indonesian foods and combined them with the simple, Y!M logo mark.
Thoughts behind the new Yeah! Meshi Branding
Logo mark
The previous logo included a female face and I didn’t want to eliminate the connection from the old to new branding. What I wanted to create was a gender neutral logo with a connection to the previous Yeah! Meshi branding, so I combined the Y, ! and M symbols to make a face. The face represents the human side of the business and helps to emphasise that it’s made by a person.
Illustration and Colours
I wanted to convey the warmth and dedication behind foods from our home cooks to customers. I decided to draw an illustration with imperfect lines, splashes of colour and abstract shapes. I chose a fresh green base colour for the designs to represent a leaf (which many Indonesian dishes are presented on) and abstract shapes to represent the different, familiar Indonesian foods.
Typography
Because the logo and illustrations are communicating strong messages, I chose to use the ‘Neue Haas Grotesk’ font as our primary and secondary typeface. ‘Neue Haas Grotesk’ is a beautifully crafted typeface by Christian Schwartz, Max Miedinger and published by Linotype. Its simple, yet highly legible and bold typeface, balances out the strong illustrations with multiple colours.
Expanding the new brand into Yeah! Meshi’s communication materials
Home cooks upload weekly menus for their customers on Instagram so I needed to adapt the new Yeah! Meshi visual languages for the menus, as well as design the packaging for the meals. Yeah! Meshi needs many different kinds of communication materials to promote the service and tell the messages.
Personal thoughts on Yeah! Meshi rebranding
As a non Indonesian designer designing for a service in Jakarta, I wanted the new branding to be as authentic and familiar as possible. I believe in any format of design, all designers have a strong responsibility to come up with something original, appropriate and authentic for the target audience.
I wanted to convey the warmth and human touch behind Yeah! Meshi through my designs. To show that it is about caring for your family, that kids love it and that it’s a really healthy option. I wanted to reassure busy families that it’s ok to cook and serve these nutritious, pre-prepared meals. I also wanted to communicate that the food is kid-friendly, that’s why there are happy faces on the designs. They are more recognisable than some of the other abstract shapes in the illustration. The energy from the food and from our home cooks is highlighted through the colours and style. I hope Yeah! Meshi is helping to relieve some of the pressure and guilt that working parents feel, especially when they don’t have time to feed their families the kind of food they would like.
