Before the Logo Redesign for Gecko Culinary Adventures happened, I had already been working with Megan Harker since 2011, on some small projects like Facebook graphics and then some business cards, an email signature and template, and a few other little items.
Gecko Culinary Adventures is situated on the Berea, in Durban, and offers cooking events and classes as well as a dining experience.
I’m just gonna say it. I’ve always had a problem with the original Gecko Culinary logo and have been angling to change it for years. For starters, it was blue, which is not a great colour for a food-related business. Secondly, the style of the gecko icon in the logo was, hmmm … odd, with little stick-insect legs. Also, not a great match for her professional and robust brand message.
In 2019, I eventually succeeded in convincing Megan to change the colour of her logo and branding, and she settled on a red and gold palette, which wasn’t perfect but better. She was still VERY attached to the logo graphic.
But it wasn’t until 2023, when Gecko was undergoing some major revamps, that Megan reached out for a redesign. To say I was excited was an understatement. lol. And I was also very grateful that she wanted to work with me on it.
Megan is the sort of client who loves to be involved in the process of whatever I’m working on for her, so she sent me some font examples, the initial one being quite a loose script, which I wasn’t mad about. I had taken aside a couple of fonts to work with, but wanted to customise them when Megan sent over the Blanka font and told me, ‘This was the one’. It did work with what we were building, so I was happy to use it.
Colour-wise, we were going to stick with the red as a primary, but darken it a little, and add black for solidity. We chucked out the gold and replaced it with a lovely sage green for differentiation. It’s also a feature colour in her decor, and we added a chocolate brown as a backup option.
Images below show the original logo, the restaurant reception, and the final new design.
But it wasn’t a straight line to get there. Let me tell you about the process.
