Packaging design that celebrates the modern incarnation of a family's love of cooking.
A self-directed branding and packaging exercise for vegetarian take-away restaurant, Yasai — named after the Japanese word for vegetables.
The restaurant owners, second-generation Japanese migrants from Melbourne, were initially inspired to open Yasai because of their family's love of cooking which stretches back generations. Providing not only high-quality Japanese food, Yasai represents their family story, interwoven through the flavours, ingredients and cooking methods of vegetarian cooking.
The brief asked for a branding experience that would communicate one of Yasai's key philosophies — the transformation of the earthy vegetable into something new, all the while harnessing its wholesome energy.
While much of Yasai is about learning from the past and building on skills transferred down the generations, it is also about the technologies and processes that we apply to the old in order to make it new.
The overall feel of the visual language draws inspiration from both Japanese visual culture, as the family's homeland, and the essential attributes of the vegetable — understated and earthy, yet offering the body nourishing energy.
A type-driven, minimal layout combined with swirling, floating elements provide a calming backdrop — breathing space for the energetic parts of the branding such as the electricity of the cyan blue and the dynamism of the shapes.
Japanese characters from the word 'yasai' are warped, rotated and rearranged to create new forms and patterns. This transformation process mimics the evolution of the owner's family traditions over the generations.