The reality of my moodboard work before a restaurant rebranding

One Friday night last month, I was eating pasta at an Italian restaurant in West Queen West, Toronto, when I found myself staring at the menu for a long time. I wasn't looking at the food. I was looking at the typeface. By the time my friend said, "Here we go again," I was already running my fingers along the embossing on the edge of the menu. You could call it an occupational hazard, but it's exactly these moments that become the starting point for client projects.

When a restaurant rebranding request comes in, most clients expect a neatly organized mood board, one where the colour palette is beautifully arranged and the reference images are laid out in orderly fashion. But the process I actually go through is quite far from that. I want to talk about that messy middle stage, the process clients never get to see.

It Starts on the Street

When I went to Lisbon last summer, I took hundreds of photos wandering the alleys of the Alfama district. Graffiti painted on walls, half-peeled tiles, old café signs. At the time, I was just taking them because I liked them, but months later, those photos played a decisive role in a rebranding project for a Portuguese restaurant in Toronto. When the client said they wanted something that "feels modern but doesn't lose its roots," I immediately thought of a certain alley wall in Alfama, one where someone had spray-painted lettering over blue azulejo tiles.

My photo library is tagged by city and subject matter. Bakery facades from the Marais in Paris, vintage signs from Kensington Market in Toronto, street art from Lisbon. I spend a cup of coffee's worth of time every Sunday morning just organizing it. It might seem excessive, but it dramatically cuts down the time I spend searching for references early in a project.

The Power of Vintage Ads

The resource I return to most often during the mood board process is vintage advertising, especially food and beverage ads from the 1950s through the 70s. The typography of that era features a lot of hand-drawn lettering, and while it looks somewhat awkward by today's standards, there's a peculiar warmth to it. A texture that digital fonts simply can't replicate.

I regularly visit a few used bookstores in Toronto to buy old magazines, anywhere from $3 to $15 each. When I scan them myself and zoom in on the details, I often find inspiration in the halftone dot patterns or the way the ink has soaked into the paper. For a recent brunch restaurant project, I took a typeface style I'd spotted in a 1960s Canadian dairy ad and gave it a modern reinterpretation to establish the logo direction. The client only saw the final result, but it all started with a beat-up $5 magazine.

Chaos on the Wall

Before I create a digital mood board, I always go through a physical stage. There's a corkboard on one wall of my home office where I pin up printouts, colour chips, material samples, and even scraps of paper torn from menus (with permission). I deliberately don't organize this board. There are moments when an unexpected combination catches your eye among the randomly juxtaposed images, and that often completely changes the direction of a project.

In a recent project, I had originally been heading toward a warm terracotta tone. But a scrap of deep navy wrapping paper that happened to be pinned next to a Lisbon street photo on the board caught my attention. That combination was far more striking. The entire colour direction shifted, and the client responded to that navy tone immediately at the first presentation.

The Hours Spent Obsessing Over Type

The stage where I linger longest in the mood board process is typography. In restaurant branding, typefaces serve as a visual preview of how the food will taste. Just as a fine dining establishment and a neighbourhood diner can't use the same typeface, a single font defines the personality of a brand.

I typically pull more than twenty typeface candidates per project and test them with actual menu text. Because something looks different on screen than it does in print, once I've narrowed down the candidates, I always print them out. Half of them get eliminated at that stage. Poor legibility at small sizes, or they don't pair well with the price numerals on a menu. This process can sometimes take days.

Only after going through all of this do I create the digital mood board. As I organize it in Figma, I distill only the essentials rescued from the chaos of the physical board. What the client sees is this refined version: a clean grid, a unified colour palette, a clear direction. But behind it all are the magazines from used bookstores, the photos of peeling tiles, and the scraps of paper on the corkboard.

I have a meeting for a new restaurant project scheduled next week. Tonight, I think I'll take a walk around Kensington Market and snap some photos of signs. I don't know yet where they'll be used, but they always end up being used. They always have.