Central to the restaurant, both at home in Japan and here in the States, is the Japanese concept of kando, an idea that doesn’t have an exact analog in English, but that boils down to a reciprocal bestowing of awe. In the case of Tatsunoya, that feeling of awe is meant to not only come from the food, but also from the space, the service, the employees, the customers, the larger community, everywhere; because, as they put it “our goal is for everyone from customers to employees to be happy, because like a circle, when our customers feel kando, we feel kando in return.”
We wanted to tie the logo and branding back to that core concept, using two simplified bowls of ramen that come together to form something that’s altogether new, subtly reflecting the idea of kando and using ramen and the restaurant itself to achieve some larger goal above or outside of feeding people food.
Once we had that overarching idea embedded in the brand, we allowed the site work and content to grow from that, making strong photography central to the pages, and keeping things simple and straight-forward, helping the client with copy writing and keeping in mind that most people who visit restaurant sites want to see 1) the menus, and 2) gorgeous pictures of food and the space. In addition to the branding, we also helped the client come up with the tagline “Awe through Tradition”.
