Al Wazzan & Al Shamali

The restaurant had the food and the room. It needed a name people could recognise from across the street and content that tastes like the place. We started with the identity and let everything else follow from it.

The logo sets the name in rough Arabic calligraphy beside a monogram of two men in profile. A sadu pattern runs down the edge of every printed piece, and the whole system lives on an aged paper ground in black, cream and a deep red.

Highlight covers carry the same calligraphy at full size: the menu, the meats and the location, each with its own sadu motif.

Every dish was shot on a white sweep with a hard black shadow cut from the brand pattern. It turns a delivery photo into a piece of identity, and it means nearly a hundred frames read as one menu.

The June lifestyle day covered what the white sweep cannot: the sign under the reed ceiling, sadu cushions, rows of dallahs, bread going into the clay oven and the pass lined with mezze.

Announcements use the paper, the pattern and the calligraphy without any photography at all, so a Talabat launch and a new year greeting still look like the restaurant.

The reels stay close to the hands: cheese pulled from a pastry at the courtyard table, eggs poured into the pan, dough slapped onto the wall of the oven and bread stacked hot.