Wilbur Mexicana Brand Launch
Chemistry, only better!
Wilbur Mexicana is a Mexican restaurant in the Fast Casual category, an emerging Canadian market that offers a higher quality dining experience than the typical QSR format we’ve become accustomed to.
Brand book excerpt
With little connection to Mexican cuisine, founders Will and Baird Cumberland recognized they would have a difficult time competing in a category dominated by appeals to authenticity. Instead, they would focus on the advantages offered by the Fast Casual format using Mexican cuisine as the springboard for a truly unique dining experience that is better not only because the food is great, but because it is designed to be better; because it is the result of a carefully formulated chemistry unshackled from tradition. To wit, they opted to name the new venture after Professor Wilbur Scoville, a chemist responsible for the Scoville Scale used to measure the heat of peppers and whose work permeates the way we talk about Mexican cuisine.
Branded food wrapper
"The Professor" icon
Wilbur wordmark
Seeking to avoid the typical cues of the category, the visual system traded in well-worn clichés like luchadors and hand-drawn sugar skulls, for elements where the worlds of chemistry, design and Mexican culture collide: hexagons, line work and found art from the apothecary to the back pages of dusty comic books all come to life in a high contrast palette of yellow and black. The Wilbur wordmark takes its inspiration from the iconic inline typography of the 1970 Mexico World Cup and the complete system includes alternate marks with an illustrated Scoville Scale featuring Professor Scoville himself in various states of pepper-induced distress.
Illustrated 'Scoville Scale' for the salsa bar indicating heat
Logo system
This work was completed at Jacknife with Rick Amaral and Shawn Lambino.
