Isola

When Isola opened their first site in 2018, the identity was assembled quickly and the brand had never been properly resolved. By 2022, with a second location already open and a third confirmed, the founders needed a system that could stretch across three distinct environments — a neighbourhood trattoria, a larger city-centre dining room, and a wine bar — without feeling uniform or corporate.

The brief was to build something that felt genuinely Italian rather than generically so, with enough typographic and graphic richness to fill large-format environmental applications, while remaining warm and readable at menu scale.

We built the identity around a custom logotype drawing on mid-century Italian design: compressed letterforms with optical corrections that give a hand-cut, slightly imperfect quality. The secondary system uses a tile-based grid motif — an abstraction of the terracotta floor tiles found in Italian farmhouse kitchens — that can be scaled from embossed menus to full-height wall graphics.

Colour is warm and restrained: a terracotta field, off-white, and a deep aubergine for emphasis. Each of the three sites gets a location-specific sub-identity using a different geometric tile variant, giving each dining room its own sense of place while remaining unmistakably part of the same family. Menu design was treated as an editorial project — the typography hierarchy and white space reflecting the care taken with the food.