Jeff Bobby, a fellow member at CrossFit Fury, stopped me on the way out from the gym towards the end of 2015. He had heard that I had designed the Furious 8 logo – a large scale local Crossfit competition Fury puts on each year. Turns out he was at the beginning stages of starting up a new fast-casual burger restaurant and needed a designer to work with him on interior and exterior art and design work for the restaurant. It’s not every day that I get asked to be a part of such a comprehensive project so when Jeff asked if I’d be interested, you bet I was!
CMB Original Logo
My friend Jenn Boswell at www.honestlyjennifer.com did a great job designing the original logo for Caveman Burgers but she was relocating out of town and Jeff wanted to have someone local to work with on the project. She and I had worked on some projects in the past and she will always be one of my favorite snarky yet supportive workout buddies at Fury. It helps to be able to pick up designing where a friend left off because she could share with me her experiences and the approach behind the logo design. Her logo concept has remained the same with the exception of reformatting the burger form to subtly contain the acronym CMB for the burger itself.
Caveman Burgers Caveman
Since the logo was complete, the next step for Caveman Burgers was to come up with a cohesive theme for the restaurant. The concept behind Caveman Burgers, originally, was rooted in the Paleo diet but further evolved into offering natural, ethically sourced and locally made food – a bringing food back to basics approach. Jeff didn’t have a specific plan of what he wanted to see but he was definitely not interested in cartoons (no Captain Caveman). He was thinking more along the lines of petroglyphs than Flintstones. I started a Moleskin graph notebook to have one location to formulate all notes and ideas specifically for this project. When working on any designs, I first like to take notes on what a client wants and then I move on to my own personal brainstorms that include written ideas (ex. words related to caveman, neanderthal, paleolithic) and then visual brainstorms for the various pieces of the project. My notebook is now halfway full with lists, brainstorms, brackets, doodles, thumbnails, outlines, cross-outs, asterisks, woolly mammoths, cavemen, and burger drawings, to name a few.
The first ideas that came to my mind from our initial meeting was cave paintings and “realistic” silhouetted figures of cavemen. Jeff had a great idea of the evolution of a burger, similar to the evolution of man drawings, that started with a caveman eating a leg of something and moving into modern man eating a burger with all the fixings. It’s amazing to see the design process as it evolves into a final concept. Eventually we eliminated the human element and ended up with the burger itself evolving from a cow between buns, to a meat leg between buns, to a . . . you get the idea. This particular concept hasn’t made it to print yet, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed! It’s one of my favorites.
The petroglyphs and the caveman silhouette remained as mainstays in the design process. The petroglyphs can be found throughout the restaurant and the CMB materials, including on cups, window signs, menu boards and even hand painted by yours truly on a corner wall of the restaurant. The caveman with speared burger image was sent to Porter Barn Wood who did an excellent job creating a metal cut out of the caveman complete with intricate cut outs of the speared burger. They, incidentally, also formed a reclaimed wood wall that includes the CMB logo burned in. It looks fantastic!
I was grateful that Jeff took to my pun-ey ideas, such as “We’ve had a mammoth of an idea” for a restaurant preview flyer and “Join the Club” – the Caveman Burgers loyalty program. It made this project all the more fun to be able to not only play off of design but also to add some humor to it. Jeff allowed me to release my inner neanderthal as we worked on bathroom signs, menu boards, ads, window displays, shirts, website, cups, wall paintings and marketing materials. I can’t even express what it’s like to see the scribbles in my Moleskin turn into real, tangible works – it truly was an exciting, all-inclusive project to be a part of.
You can find out more about Caveman burgers at www.cavemanburgers.com, but even better, check it out in person and enjoy your own amazing customized burger and fries and let me know what you think! You can find Caveman Burgers in the north valley at 430 E. Bell Rd Suite 103 in Phoenix.
#EatLikeaCaveman
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