Heitzman Traditional Bakery is legendary in Louisville, Kentucky. The bakery started in 1891, and is run by the great granddaughter of the founder, with many of the original family recipes still used today. However, many of the public’s favorites were known by reputation only, as they were never listed on the overhead menu board in the deli, or in the take-away flyer menu.
Summa Creative was asked to create two necessary pieces of promotional material. The first, a comprehensive menu brochure listed all of the options for breakfast and lunch offerings in the restaurant, a complete catering menu, special holiday offerings, and wedding cake information. The second piece was a menu specifically for bridal shows and expos where the owners of the bakery would be speaking to hundreds of people, and needed to be able to pass along complete, detailed information about all of their catering and wedding cake options.
The difficulty we faced in producing the materials was that there was no consistency in any of the previous marketing materials. Logo and logotype, color and font architecture, and design structure were all wildly different from use to use. The only uniformity was in the name of the bakery, and in the use of the illustration that was referred to as Cake Man. On one hand, we had no true constraints with our designs, since there were no standards and guidelines to follow. But, we recognized that in creating these pieces, we would be defacto creating a visual brand identity, with a range of secondary design elements (supporting typography, brand color palette, icons, graphic elements, and photographic and illustration direction) that would have to be able to support the brand and help sustain it wherever it appeared.
In creating the pieces, we discarded much of the design from the past and focused on the three recognizable elements: the name, images of the food, and Cake Man. Modernizing the look, and paring down the contents, we shifted focus on the pieces to the photographs of the food itself. Giving the text ample breathing room, we developed a family of iconography to guide the user through the menus. These changes gave a fresh, crisp, and clean look to the pieces, made them very easy to use, and got Cake Man ready for his next 125 years!
