El Toril
El Toril is a Spanish gourmet burger restaurant with sites in Madrid and Girona. One of their co-founders, Jesús, had already designed a strong abstract bull logo for the main icon — an icon also fire-branded directly into the burger buns. Our responsibility was to help flesh out a brand identity, choosing typography, colors and adding many secondary brand assets such as stamps, typographic lockups and stickers.
Client:
Year:
El Toril Urban
2020
The main secondary logo was based around the Spanish copywriting “Aquí se come con las manos”, which translates literally to “Here you eat with your hands”, but it works a bit better (and sounds cooler) in Spanish.
The general tone is one of rebellion, underground, punk food. Steering away from typical clean photography, we wanted harsher flash lighting and models with tattoos, shot candidly and eating naturally.
Typography in the identity
Typography plays a starring role in the identity, and the varying weights of Druk were chosen as the main brand typeface, with the open-source Space Grotesk & Space Mono for secondary usage. Using heavy and condensed font weights, we mixed numerous styles.
The aim at the beginning was to simply play around in a layered style and get a feel for what works best, adding in textures, photography and secondary brand sticker elements. We then began refining key pieces, looping back to ensure overall consistency, and developing guidelines.
For urban advertising, we wanted to also highlight specific star dishes and ingredients that one wouldn't normally expect from a hamburger joint named 'El Toril'. The pulled pork burger, for example, was extremely popular, and clever copywriting allowed us to push this further across advertising, social media and food-delivery apps. 'Tequeños' are a typical Venezuelan side dish of speared bread dough with cheese in the middle, and this influence comes from the Venezeulan founders themselves.
Brand triangle & stickers
Based on the Penrose / 'impossible' triangle, we created a typographic lockup as one of the key secondary brand assets. Its triangular form mirrors that of the bull icon. In addition, and in fitting with the underground theme, we created a bunch of brand stickers to be used across designs and on the food-delivery packaging itself.
When opening their restaurant in Conde Duque, Madrid, El Toril turned to Nihil Estudio, a Spanish interior design firm based in Valencia. Using our brand assets as a base, Jesús and Nihil Estudio worked to design a bold space with several rooms, one of which became dubbed the 'Pink Room' in reference to El Toril's legendary pulled pork.
The brand triangle was also used for t–shirts. In addition to staff uniform on-site, these serve to represent the brand at off-site venues, such as music festivals, in which branding options are restricted or limited. El Toril would soon become official food providers for some of the biggest festivals across Spain, such as Madrid's Mad Cool.
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