Makan by Foreign Policy
This week, Foreign Policy's branding for Mexico-based Singaporean restaurant Makan, and Among Equals' branding for a very different kind of convenience store.
Yes we Makan
Opinion by Emily Gosling
The chintzy rose; the bright but slightly dusky pink; the multifarious wordmarks; the apparently haphazard, painterly decorative flourishes; an approach to letter sizing that’s borderline unhinged – the branding for Makan has the potential to be all kinds of terrible.
Instead, it’s absolutely the opposite, thanks to the deft hands at Foreign Policy (Park Bench Deli, Project Send, Critical Mass).
Makan is a Singaporean restaurant based in Mexico City that combines the two cultures weirdly seamlessly. That’s thanks in part to its founders, Mexican Mario Malváez and Singaporean Maryann Yong.
Their paths crossed in Singapore, and Makan was eventually born thanks to their shared “drive,” according to Makan, “to dive deeper into Southeast Asian cuisine and take their experience beyond borders.”
Transcending borders – indeed, the art of taking two things and creating a totally new, third whole in that Brion Gysin/William Burroughs cut-up way – feels beautifully analogous to what Foreign Policy has done with the branding for Makan: never “leaning on clichés,” as the agency puts it, but instead “translating culture… The identity begins with vernacular”.
That means that it never defaults to tried and tested, sad, boring, and frankly largely inaccurate visual signifiers of Asia – which makes sense, considering that Foreign Policy itself is from Singapore…
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Storrd by Among Equals
Opinion by Emily Gosling
London is awash with convenience stores – from the acrid yellow signage of Nisa to the misleadingly named ubiquity of Costcutter to the countless independents named things like Ben’s, despite the fact they have nothing to do with anybody called Ben.
Such shops – reliably there at most times of day, reliably overpriced (hence the convenience I suppose, like an airport Wetherspoons – trading off the old ‘any port in a storm’ model) – have hitherto been absolutely nothing to write home about. They just exist.
Now, however, there’s a new convenience store in town – one apparently so novel that it’s even had a writeup in TimeOut. Storrd bills itself as “a convenience store that finally lives up to its name,” with its first branch opening in Camden, and – so it promises – more to follow, though where these will be is as yet undisclosed.
Storrd’s website copy continues that it’s here to “flip the script” on the “dim aisles, empty shelves, and joyless sandwiches” that ‘convenience’ has come to connote. Instead, while it promises to be open “early, late, and every moment in between,” it offers something more than the usual 7/11 type retailers, selling posh healthy hot meals, specialty brewed coffee and all that a decent bakery contains as well as the usual tinned goods and fish fingers.
In short, from the sounds of it, it’s a high-brow corner shop – more like a cross between a New York deli, a Whole Foods and a Co-op than the classic faintly dusty Best In type places.
It’s quite a novel concept, in the UK at least, and as such, one that warranted something a bit different when it comes to the branding and identity…
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