Responses by Hannah Lee, designer, john st.
Background: The Goods is a Toronto-based restaurant that offers healthy, nourishing and organic foods—soups, salads, sauces/dressings and smoothies. The restaurant felt the need to increase brand awareness locally, as the name of the restaurant has no immediate link to food. In combination with advertising a new store opening, we created a series of out-of-home posters to advertise the functional, healing philosophy of the Goods within Toronto.
Reasoning: There’s a lot of evil in today’s world of food. Chemicals, sugar, saturated fats, synthetic ingredients and processed everything. At its core, the Goods stands in opposition to all of it. Inspired by its mission statement of only using ingredients that have a beneficial effect on the body, we created a new tagline: Eat No Evil. The illustrations are wide-open mouths; the negative space of which doubles as a whole fruit, to visually communicate eating fresh, eating organic and eating whole.
Challenges: The illustration style. It had to be visually striking and attention grabbing, while also laddering back up to the Goods’s passionate, contemporary and friendly spirit. We landed on a style that makes use of bold color blocking within organic forms.
Favorite details: A small aspect that was surprisingly difficult was finding fruits and vegetables that were immediately recognizable at a short glance. As out-of-homes have a split second to catch attention, we are proud that we were able to create such striking, meaningful illustrations.
Time constraints: We didn’t face any unreasonable time constraints on this one; our client was a dream to work with. We felt very fortunate in that regard.
Alternative approach: Looking back, it would have been nice to think further about expanding the conceptual illustrations onto other applications, such as an in-store murals and corporate materials.
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