Overview: Cow Café is a neighborhood spot in downtown Los Angeles that had been open for eight years. The brand identity had drifted over time, with inconsistent logos and visual assets across different touchpoints. I worked directly with the owners to redesign the logo from scratch, completely rebuild the menu, and bring the whole identity into a more cohesive system.

Challenge: Small businesses rarely build their brand all at once. Things get added over time, and inconsistencies accumulate quietly. At Cow Café, eight years of small decisions had added up: multiple logo versions across touchpoints and a menu built in Illustrator with no paragraph styles, painful to update and not well organized. The owners had differing opinions about where the brand should go, which meant navigating that alongside the design itself.

Solution: I rebuilt the menu in InDesign with paragraph styles, condensed to a single 8.5"×14" front-and-back sheet, reorganized and copyedited along the way. I also redesign the logo from scratch, leaning away from the obvious (a cow), the mark uses a cow-spot shape as its backdrop, which is recognizable without being too literal, and scalable to any size. The new identity extends across menus, signage, and social media, giving the café a cohesive visual system for the first time.