This visual identity case study is a little different from most you will find on a design studio website. It’s the kind of project that happens when everything lines up: a clear brief, an instinct that clicks early, a solid process that’s been tempered through various projects, and a skilled designer that can work quickly and effectively. Oh, and only eight hours to complete it.
Earlier this year I took on a passion project through Brief Me Baby, a creative Instagram account that publishes design briefs for designers to respond to for skill development and love of the craft. Brief number 42 was for Bad Bun, a fictional gourmet burger brand with attitude. I treated it with the same rigour I bring to every client project: same thinking, quality standards, care, and attention to how all the pieces work together. The time limit was really the only variable that changed.
I want to walk through this visual identity project properly, because the story of how it came together in a day says something useful about what good branding actually needs. And what can get in the way of it.
The Brief: Visual Identity
Bad Bun is the burger joint with a rebellious streak. The brief described it as bold, playful and unapologetic. The kind of place you go before the party, after the party and sometimes instead of the party. Think late nights, glossy buns, a queue out the door and packaging people actually want to be seen holding. The challenge was to build a visual identity that felt cheeky, confident and impossible to ignore.
That is a genuinely strong brief to work from. There is a clear personality, a clear audience, a clear niche and a clear visual ambition. It gave me everything I needed to make real decisions rather than guessing. This matters more than most people realise when they’re thinking about hiring a designer: the quality of the brief has a direct effect on the quality and speed of the work. A vague brief doesn’t just slow things down. It can produce weaker initial concepts, because the designer is filling in gaps rather than knowing what solves the actual problem.
Where the Logo Concept Came From
The brief came with the words Bad Bun set in a bold, chunky font. I noticed something in those letterforms straight away. The letters B-A-D, when stacked and viewed a certain way, almost resembled a burger bun on its side. The B and D could form the top and bottom of the bun shape, with the A creating a natural gap where the filling would sit. Remove the A entirely, let the B and D do the structural work, and you had the bones of a logo icon.
I explored a few other directions first. Concepts sketched by hand in my trusty sketchbook looked at various ways of filling the brief. Nothing quite had an impact like that first instinct, so I moved into Illustrator to develop it properly.
One thing I had to be careful about was making sure the result looked nothing like another well-known burger brand that already uses a bun shape sandwiching its wordmark. Distinctiveness matters in visual identity work, not just aesthetically but commercially. A brand that looks like another brand is a liability, not an asset.
Once I’d crafted a custom wordmark I was satisfied with, I used the B and D letterforms to construct the shape of the bun icon. To give it the attitude the brief was asking for, I added punk-influenced details: cross-shaped eyes as a nod to the word bad and the irreverence you see in street culture, and a tongue sticking out, partly for cheek and partly to connect to the food itself.
I made a deliberate choice to round the X shapes slightly more than the letterforms in the wordmark. The type is angular and structured, so the softer X relaxes the icon just enough to feel playful rather than aggressive. Those are the kinds of decisions that don’t always get noticed consciously, but they are felt. They’re the difference between a mark that feels considered and one that just looks like a design exercise.
A Logo Suite, Not Just a Logo
One of the most important things a visual identity should give a business is flexibility. A single logo version is rarely enough. As the business functioned, Bad Bun was always going to need to work across packaging, social media, signage, menus, stamp-sized applications and large-format print.
The solution was a logo suite with several configurations. The icon works well alone, recognisable even at sticker size. The wordmark sits comfortably by itself. For horizontal formats, the two sit side by side as a lockup. Bringing it all together, the icon also works with the wordmark nested inside it at larger sizes. Then there’s the tongue element, lifted from the icon, which works as a standalone graphic within the wider brand, giving whoever is creating content something distinctive to reach for that doesn’t always need the full logo.
When a business only has one version of their logo, they end up distorting it, squishing it into spaces it was never designed for, or skipping certain applications altogether because nothing fits. A suite built thoughtfully from the start removes that problem before it becomes one.
Colour Decisions That Earn Their Place
Fast food branding has a well-worn colour vocabulary: red, yellow, or both. I deliberately moved away from that. Bad Bun is positioning itself as a gourmet experience, the queue-round-the-block kind of place rather than the drive-through kind, so the branding needed to signal that without literally spelling it out.
Orange and black became the core palette. Orange carries enough warmth and appetite-stimulating quality for food branding, but reads as more considered than red. Against deep black it has an energy that feels urban and confident. A supporting yellow adds secondary warmth, and a soft cream-toned neutral gives the palette somewhere to breathe. A slate grey sits quietly as a fifth option, something cooler that works well on more subdued applications.
Colour in a visual identity is rarely just about aesthetics. It carries associations, triggers emotional responses and has to work practically across print, screen, packaging and signage. Those five colours were not chosen because they look nice together. They were chosen because they do a specific job for this specific brand.
Typography With a Role to Play
Gabarito handles headings and Gorditas handles body text. Both are modern, characterful fonts that carry personality without becoming hard to read. Gabarito has the solidity and weight that works well at signage scale. Gorditas has a slightly more playful quality that suits menus, packaging copy and social content.
Typography decisions in a visual identity project aren’t about finding a font that looks good in the logo. The real job is finding a type system that works consistently across every possible application, from receipts and menus to social posts and signage, without feeling rigid or requiring constant design decisions every time something new is produced.
Brand Patterns: Extending the Visual Suite
Because Bad Bun was always going to live on packaging, the identity needed repeating graphic elements that could wrap around boxes, bags, cups and wrappers without defaulting to the logo every time. Two patterns came out of the work.
The first takes the X from the logo’s eyes and builds it into a checkerboard. Checkerboards have a long history in punk visual culture, so the reference sits naturally with the brand’s attitude, while the embedded X keeps it unmistakably Bad Bun. It reads immediately in orange and black even without the logo present.
The second pattern tiles the icon, the X and the tongue together into something busier and more illustrative, better suited to larger surfaces where the brand needs to feel generous and full of energy.
Patterns are one of the more underestimated parts of visual identity work. They give a brand something to put on packaging without needing to force a logo into a size or shape it was not designed for. They extend the visual profile into spaces where a logo alone would look thin. And once they exist, they cost nothing to use. They are just part of the toolkit.
What the Finished Identity Looks Like in Use
With the core visual identity in place (the logo suite, colour palette, typography and patterns), it became possible to show how Bad Bun would exist in the real world. The lifestyle mockups show it on packaging, on a neon sign, on a table menu card, on fry packaging and burger boxes. The brand was designed with those applications in mind from the start, which is why it looks cohesive (and amazing) across all of them without strain.
This is what a visual identity built as a system looks like in practice. The packaging feels right because the colours and patterns were designed for it. Printed material evokes the brand immediately. Social content is consistent because the type and colour choices were made with that in mind from day one. Even a neon sign works because the icon was built to hold up at scale. Nothing has to be forced to fit because it was all deliberately designed to work together.
What a Day Actually Tells You
For this visual identity case study, the whole Bad Bun brand suite, including an Instagram carousel to present the work, was completed in a single working day. That’s not a point about speed for its own sake. Most of my brand identity projects run for around a week from start to final deliverables, sometimes longer depending on the scope and the number of rounds of refinement involved. What the one-day turnaround demonstrates is what becomes possible when a brief is genuinely clear, a process is properly in place, and the creative direction clicks early.
An awesome full brand identity project was possible in a single day not because of luck or a simple brief. It was the result of years of refinement, a designer’s eye that’s been trained across hundreds of decisions, lateral thinking, and the kind of creative instinct that can spot a concept where others might not think to look. Experience means fewer dead ends. A logical mind means the work fits together like the pieces of a puzzle. Good decision-making means nothing arbitrary makes it through. That’s what business owners are actually getting when they invest in someone who knows what they’re doing.
Thinking about your own visual identity?
If this case study of the Bad Bun project has given you a clearer picture of what visual identity work involves and you are wondering whether your business is ready for it, I would love to have that conversation. The first step is always a relaxed, no-pressure chat to find out whether it is the right fit.
Lesley Miles
Strategic Brand Designer & Digital ConsultantEmpowering businesses to soar with captivating brand experiences.