Restaurant design based on the principles of Letterism.

The final for my identity design class was to develop a concept and visual language for a fictitious San Francisco restaurant based on a historical artistic movement of my choosing. The challenge of this assignment was to develop a system based on the principles and ideologies of the movement, as opposed to adopting the visual language of the movement itself. 

I chose the French Avant-Garde movement “Letterism,” spearheaded by Isidore Isou and based primarily on the principle that utopia is achievable when a society prioritizes expression of the individual over profits of the collective. Many of their early works centered on letters and other visual or spoken symbols, and they utilized semiotics, or the study of signs and symbols, based on these explorations and theories.

The visual identity of my restaurant, “Semantics” is based on the semiotic-centered framework of the Letterists. It evolved from my own explorations of symbols and experiments in communication and meaning into the system you see here. Through experiments that deconstruct, reassemble, and re-assign meaning through type and image, my design for Semantics seeks not to disregard language, but challenge it’s rigidity as the Letterists would have done.