BACKGROUND: Mooncusser is an upscale seafood restaurant in Boston's Back Bay, recognized by the New York Times as one of the 25 best restaurants in Boston. Chef Carl Dooley runs a four-course tasting menu that rewrites itself every six weeks, built around whatever’s fresh and inspiring him at the moment. The food is precise, ingredient-forward, and globally influenced, from local striped bass with urfa biber to foie gras with duck tongues to unagi over sushi rice. DESIGN PROBLEM:The cuisine has a clear point of view but the identity didn't yet match it. My job was create a brand identity that could hold the tension between fine dining and personality that still felt thoughtful without feeling precious, and upscale without playing it safe.
The goal was to build something with a real point of view that reflected the way the kitchen actually operates.
SKETCHES + MOODBOARD
Pulled from Mooncusser’s IG page, editorial pages, organic forms
DESIGN PROCESS: I started by looking closely at the food and found the colors to be genuinely interesting: deep beet and pomegranate, warm spiced broth, the blue-green of the ceramics, spiced with saffron and turmeric. I pulled the entire palette directly from those images which meant every color decision had a real reason behind it.
From there I thought a lot about what makes Mooncusser different from other upscale seafood places in Boston. The menu rewrites itself every six weeks, the chef cooks instinctively, the food is serious but still funky. I wanted the identity to reflect a place that felt confident enough to be a little rough around the edges rather than polished and neutral. The tension between fine dining and funk became the brief I was designing toward.
I explored several logomark directions before landing on the urchin. Early versions leaned too decorative, whether it was a more literal shell or an algae-like branch. None of them had the right tension between the food and the identity.
DESIGN SOLUTION: The final logomark ended up being an abstracted sea urchin. This worked because it's difficult to draw perfectly, which means it always looks handmade regardless of how many times it's reproduced, and it has a clear tension with the handwritten all caps logotype. Additionally, the urchin was the most direct reference to the food without being purely decorative and decisively seafood-based. It’s abstracted enough to allow Mooncusser to expand in any direction they want in the future, and I drew it loose so it reads as organic and ever-changing. For the logotype I used Felt Tip Woman, a handwritten typeface that looks like something the chef scribbled down: fast, confident, and slightly imperfect. For body type, I chose Neue Haas Unica, a clean and contemporary grotesque that pairs well with the handwritten headers.
The full system includes a tasting menu, drinks menu, wine list, business cards, and thank you and birthday cards. The three menus can be clipped together, each a different size so the colors stagger visibly behind one another.