Brand identity and creative direction
Hawkers branding
A brand system for a fast-growing Asian street food restaurant group, built to feel as loud, warm and hand-made as the food.
The brief
Hawkers started as a single Orlando restaurant serving the dishes its founders grew up with at street stalls across Asia. As the group expanded, the brand had to travel to new cities without losing the energy of the original: every location needed to feel local and lived-in, not like a chain.
The challenge was to build one system flexible enough for menus, packaging, apparel, signage and full-wall murals, while giving each new restaurant its own personality.
My role
I joined as senior art director and later became creative director, leading an in-house team of designers, photographers and videographers.
I owned the brand end to end: the 40-page brand guidelines, the menu suite, takeout packaging, uniforms and merch, neon signage and seasonal campaigns. I also traveled to new locations to design and paint the murals myself.
The system
Street culture is the anchor for everything we design. The brand borrows the energy of night markets and hawker stalls: bold color, loud art and a lot of hand-drawn illustration.
Asian heritage runs through every piece, and the restaurants lean into Asian holidays like Lunar New Year as reasons to celebrate with guests. The result is an art-forward brand where the artwork does as much of the talking as the food. The work earned Central Florida Art Director of the Year and a string of ADDY awards.