Scribbles and crumpled receipts: Davy Denduyver pulls vivid cues in his identity for Saigon’s Elgin — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

“Stripping the visual languages I create down to the basics has been part of evolving my practice, which hasn’t been easy for someone big on ‘out there’ stuff. I do believe that if you can create a strong visual language through the use of type, layout and colour, you can actually create the best solution,” says Bruges-based designer Davy Denduyver, when asked why he took a type-forward approach in his branding for Elgin, a restaurant in Saigon, Vietnam. Elgin’s identity looks pretty busy at first glance; however, some careful sifting is enough to discover that the dense compositions are actually made of type-based graphics stripped down to their bones.

For Denduyver, branding Elgin was a process brimming with inspiration – on one hand, he had heard the story of how Doug and Mimi, the co-founders, had met at Elgin Street in Hong Kong, while they were working in different restaurants on that same street. That anecdote led to the name of their first restaurant together. On the other hand, Denduyver wanted to work with a simple visual idea pulled from the heart of the brand story, that could be tweaked to create complex compositions. And so, the team decided that the identity “should feel like a homage to restaurant culture; we all felt like that just summarised everything perfectly,” Denduyver tells us. “So after lots of experimenting with that idea in the back of my mind, I landed on restaurant receipts and their typical layouts and the process of thermal printing – which were the main inspiration for the look.”

The hat tip to thermal printing and receipts is felt throughout the design system – in its errors and intentional gaffes, the stretched and squished type. Denduyver cleverly tucks in hints at printing errors in the type treatment. For example, in the drinks menu, “there’s a lot of stretched typography. I made all the categories fit the same size, completely messing up the spacing and stretching the letters out as much as possible, or mashing them. In certain assets like social media graphics and the first t-shirt we did, there’s a lot of repetition. I wanted to challenge myself and hit the right balance of seriousness and playfulness,” he tells us. The bold text with a look-at-me energy is set in Therma by Astrae Studio. “This typeface was exactly what we needed and perfectly fit into everything else,” Denduyver adds. For the secondary text, he opted for Basier Circle to amp up the contrast with the display typeface.

The wordmark, which brings an expressive and intimate touch to the branding was hand-drawn, riffing off of the idea of scribbles on receipts. “My work is big on contrast and juxtaposition, and that’s also something the client mentioned they liked about my work from the start,” says Denduyver. “Since the identity is so type-heavy, it wouldn’t have felt right to do something similar to the thermal printing for the logo. When I save receipts for myself, I always quickly write stuff down on it, and sometimes people working in restaurants do it too. This idea of a quick handwritten note was the main inspiration.” The scribbled wordmark with patchy outlines brings a fitting sense of craft to the identity, which is a study of juxtapositions that don’t compete for attention and feel exactly right.