Responses by blok design.

Background: Ryuko is a new Japanese kitchen and bar restaurant concept in Calgary offering a space to connect through the value of love and food. Ryuko fills a void within the market, offering high-quality, thoughtful and authentic Japanese food within a beautifully designed environment.

Design thinking: In Japanese, the word ryuko means both “dragon” and “tiger,” which perfectly captures the strong yet complementary personalities of the restaurant’s business partners. We designed a flexible visual language that takes a contemporary approach to traditional Japanese sensibility, textures and imagery.

Challenges: Ensuring we did not fall into visual cultural cliches and instead found new ways of celebrating a rich tradition while moving the visual language forward.

Favorite details: One of the design elements we truly enjoyed was the depiction of the tiger-dragon icon. We found it challenging and enriching to graphically balance these two images that carry so much meaning within a culture in the most reductive way.

Visual influences: Through our research, we explored historical iconography, a plethora of traditional Japanese woodcuts and designs highlighting simplicity, balance and harmony that influenced our typography, color palette and visual language. The stamp we created was even produced in Japan.

Time constraints: The design of this restaurant started with a tight deadline, yet we philosophically believe that time is always in our favor. Given the timing, we could only work on one design option, which meant the project needed to begin with great clarity, understanding and active listening. Sometimes, these constraints end up being the perfect creative process, guiding us to follow our intuition with more intent and give all our creativity and focus to one solution.

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