Critique: Hot Box Designs

This week I designed the T/F feature spreads with Tova, but since they're coming out tomorrow, I don't want to spoil the surprise! So, I thought I would share some of my design work for my internship with Hot Box instead.

I've been working on some signs for them lately. Basically, the biggest challenge has been formatting their fonts and colors. We are trying to come up with some of these things because all of the designs they have done now are all sort of different from each other. The biggest problem is that most of their signs, and even their logo, had been drawn by hand, so when they want to change something, it takes a long time and cannot be done quickly. Coming up with a style for their signs, logo, ads, whatever is going to be essential to helping them improve overall. So, here are some font ideas I had to use for the signs. Next to the font choices is the board they have displayed at the store now.

I wanted to match some of the designs that had already been done on the hand-written boards, but I didn't think it was necessary to look the exact same. My favorite font for some of the "headline" elements was the 4th one down, but the owner liked the second one down. I had some difficulty persuading him, but in the end we both decided on the 5th one down. My issue with the bubble letters that he liked was that they could never be filled color-wise. The format of the font made it so only outlines would show color and I didn't think that was a risk he wanted to take. I didn't think using that as the dominant text would produce the results he wanted because they would never be filled. The last font, "cookie text" is what we decided to go with for the menu item descriptions. 

So, my project for the weekend is to redesign the boards. After meeting with him yesterday, here is a VERY ROUGH idea for the format. Also, I'm trying to develop the color palette, which is something I'm having a little difficulty with especially because I have to make sure it works with his vision, too. 

The background of the boards will be black, so I was playing with that to see how those bubble letters would look. They stand out much better with the black background, so that was helpful! It's nice to have some of these other projects going on because they allow me to take a break from class assignments, but they're still helping me build a portfolio.