Friday Likes 236

A couple of visually overloaded projects book-end a simpler one this week, with work from Antwerp, Lisbon, and Stockholm.

Black & Yellow by eltipo

Black & Yellow is a coffee shop in Antwerp, Belgium, with as much attitude as caffeine. The identity, designed by local designer eltipo, is perhaps unsurprisingly served up in a palette of black and yellow and breaks away from the chic/rustic coffee shop trend with a more… metal graphic language that looks and feels so good. I love pretty-looking design but this over-the-top, take-it-or-leave-it, sign-of-the-horns-hand-sign aesthetic is such a welcome approach. The “B” doubling as a lightning bolt is great and the illustration of the dragon wrapping around the espresso machine’s portafilter is epic. \m/_ See full project

Carla Baz by Studio AH—HA

Carla Baz is a a French-Lebanese product designer based in Beirut, Lebanon, combining different materials with gold, a distinctive trait captured quite playfully by Lisbon, Portugal-based Studio AH—HA. A lovely, simple, and loosely spaced wordmark is accompanied by confetti-like gold dots and thin lines that adorn the minimalist applications. The extra loose lowercase type is kind of annoying but all the gold foil makes up for it because gold foil. See full project

Spanjorskan by Lobby Design

Spanjorskan is a restaurant in Stockholm specializing in Spanish food and if you like octopus this logo and identity is for you. Designed by local firm Lobby Design, the logo is a crazy — terrible, actually, but so terrible it’s great — mix of letterforms, colors, and textures that by sheer lack of fucks given works fantastically. The logo has been translated into a super fun sign and a cringe-worthy but still awesome 3D animation that can be seen on the restaurant’s home page. The logo also serves as a textural background for the applications, used extra large but tempered with some pretty nice typography and elegant layouts, creating a very interesting combination of high and low brow. See full project