The Cathay Restaurant Logo

The Cathay Restaurant was one of Singapore’s leading restaurants with a colourful history going back to the heydays of the famed Cathay Hotel in which it was located. It was the place, to use a cliche, where everybody who is anybody goes to dine and wine, to see and be seen.

 For its relaunch I was commissioned to redesign its logo and related collaterals including those for the hotel proper. I presented two logos for consideration and the one below was passed over. It was inspired by the motifs on Shang dynasty sacrificial bronzeware which I had woven into the letters. 

 In hindsight some of the letterforms like the H might be hard to make out unless one is already primed to see the word Cathay. 
Letterforms inspired by the curlicue motifs on Shang dynasty sacrificial bronzeware like the water instrument on display in the Shanghai Museum, below. 
Fortunately for me the other concept (pictured in the cinema ad below) was accepted, perhaps due to its legibility and the association of Cathay with the dragon, although it is quite conventional by comparison. 
The approved logo featured in a cinema ad.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Inspired by the Salon des Refusés, Paris 1863

When numerous artists whose works for exhibition at the annual Salon Paris were turned down by the jury, they found an unexpected champion, none other than Emperor Napoleon III. Responding to public concern over the decisions of the jurors, Napoleon set up the Salon des Refusés in 1863 to let the rejected works gain some public exposure, deservedly or not. Read more here. In my career I have faced many such "refusés" situations, but instead of letting them get me down, I just filed away the works. Some eventually metamorphosised into new works, others are still languishing in my portfolios. In this blog I will resurrect some of the stuff that my clients rejected and post them for public review. Roses or rotten tomatoes, I'll take them in my stride. Preparation works including scanning of pre-digital pieces are ongoing for new posts.
Read more

Riding the AI Revolution to Achieve Top-of-Mind Awareness

Image
  Artificial Intelligence as a tool With Artificial Intelligence sweeping the world by storm, our product positioning for Pilot Pen as the leader in pen technology and innovation has found the perfect vehicle to drive up top-of-mind awareness. We proposed kicking off a promo in school bookshops featuring, you guessed it, AI generated content containing gleaming metallic robots against galactic night-sky backgrounds evoking a futuristic world for Pilot Pen products. We would do three ads centred on this theme.  Launch ad featured AI-generated robot hand and galactic sky The launch ad offering two free tubes of pencil lead refills with pen purchase performed to expectations and generated considerable buzz in the schools. This AI generated image featured a chrome-finished steel robot's hand  against a galactic sky background. Followup ad didn’t go down well. For the next ad in the series which offered a free ink refill with pen purchase, we continued focusing on the produc
Read more

Stone Age tribe found in Singapore.

Image
While working on some export promotional packaging for spice paste maker Asian Home Gourmet at the turn of the millennium, I was invited to pitch for a print advertising campaign. These products take the chore out of cooking traditional local specialties like curries, stews, roasts and stir-fries which involve gathering many ingredients that are then pounded or ground in stone pestle and mortar implements. The arrival of electric food processors do help, but AHG’s spice pastes take it one step further by providing all the key ingredients in a ready-to-use sachet. The old way is so yesterday and literally so Stone Age using those granite grinding devices. Hence the theme adopted here to bring out the wow factor of convenience in a bag. The first concept (above)  was to be rendered in comics style, telling of a family rescued from stone age drudgery. I toyed with another headline "Stone Age tribe found in Singapore" but decided prudence was the better part of valo
Read more