The Bard and Bear Gaming Café

Spec Work

The Bard and Bear is a gaming café that also hosts special events like murder mystery dinners, live-action role playing games and Magic the Gathering tournaments. The heart and soul of this gaming café is Bear, the owners’ dog. I wanted to make sure he was included in the design, so I had Bear in mind when I was working on the initial concept for this visual identity. I wanted to be sure to include the ‘ye olde’ pub/tavern aesthetic, which is another key theme for the café.

I put together a clean colour palette, with a typeface that had a strong medieval fantasy feel to it. Next, I had to represent the café’s name sakes; a bard and Bear, and did so by creating an illustrated mandolin that uses a paw print instead of the traditional sound hole. The variations of the logo, lettermark and icon allow the branding to be scalable and easily utilised in a variety of applications.