
The Small Business Development Center offers free advising, workshops, and resources for small businesses. During the Covid19 pandemic, they have been hard at work helping their clients continue to grow and thrive. One of the ways they are doing so is through targeted mini-programs such as Restaurant Academy, which has the goal of helping food businesses adapt to the new normal.



My role as a graphic designer was to develop branding and create a flyer, a certificate of completion, and an email newsletter. For the overall branding, the focus was to keep some of the standard SBDC elements (solid color geometric shapes, red and blue, type focused) and turn them into something more light, fun, modern, and positive. The red and blue were shifted to a brighter pink and blue that are more fresh and exciting. Orange and green were added as accent colors. The geometric shapes and use of borders were kept but the offset black outline was added to liven it up. The logo features a carrot because they are bright, crisp, healthy, and refreshing.
I selected the typeface Acre by Jonathan Ball because it is a geometric sans serif like Montserrat, the typeface used by SBDC for their logos and headlines. Again, the goal was to create something in line with but slightly straying from the usual SBDC branding. Acre is also narrower than Montserrat. Since "Restaurant Academy" is long, using a narrow typeface doesn't make it feel long. Instead, it is bright, sharp, compact, and clear. Acre also features apexes that come to a slightly flattened point, which subtly mimics the shape of a carrot, as seen in the A, M, and N.
