PASTA FLYER
VISUAL IDENTITY • MESSAGING • PHOTO & VIDEO DIRECTION • MOTION DESIGN
Through the Museum of Food and Drink, we met many incredible culinary artists that were pushing the boundaries of taste and science in their work. Two such individuals were Mark Ladner and Cesare Casella, two of the most renowned chefs in New York City.
Mark had a science-based concept for creating high-quality pasta in a fraction of the time than traditionally needed – this was Pasta Flyer. Alongside partner Nastassia Lopez, the story they came to us with was that of an Italian grandmother (Nonna) that had been visited by aliens. So impressed with her traditional Italian cooking, the aliens combined their superior technology with her cuisine to create delicious pasta in a flash, and distribute it over the world.
IDENTITY
The Pasta Flyer logo is both a plate and a flying saucer, intersecting the type. Colors for the type are a vodka-sauce pink and ‘noise,’ a grainy black and white texture. To represent the dichotomy of old and new, I created tagline copy to encapsulate the restaurant’s offering - ‘Old World at Light Speed’ – ‘Authentic Pasta in Under a Minute.’
The noise texture was derived from old photographs from 1960s Italy, meant to represent the heyday of ‘nonna.’ We added images of shiny metallic flying saucers (or their shadows) into these old photos to suggest the presence of the high-tech aliens, and these images became the tone-setting devices for the brand in-store and in digital marketing.
MARKETING
The combination of grainy imagery with crisp graphics became the visual calling card of the restaurant, both for social applications and for physical advertising. These were complemented by in-store product photography by Beth Galton.
PHYSICAL ELEMENTS
To bring the restaurant to life, we created a variety of graphic pieces, from menu slips to tray liners, training posters and postcards, and a giant mural photograph of a UFO buzzing roman ruins in 1965.