Hullabaloo Contemporary branding for Indian cuisine

Hullabaloo is a vegetarian, Indian street food venture based in London. They required a creative agency to develop the branding strategy for their two locations – Hullabaloo Deptford & Hullabaloo Greenwich.

Named after Chef and Co-founder Harish Kumar's nickname – Baloo – the brand identity was already pointing in a vibrant, fun, and creative direction. Having been to India previously, the strategy for the brand positioning was to adopt a clean and modern style whilst also capturing the colour and heritage of the country without becoming cliché.

For the design of the wordmark, a minimal, geometric sans serif type style was modified with sharp, subtle angular serifs as a nod to the past. Despite Hullabaloo serving affordable, street-style dishes, the quality is exemplary – Baloo has worked with Michelin star Chef Atul Kochhar. Consequently, black was selected as the base palette brand colour to convey the sophisticated quality of their product with orange providing the vibrant highlight.

The logotype was calm and confident, but it required a marque that was fun and dynamic in contrast.

What if Hullabaloo was an animal?

The idea of a playful illustration style of an elephant emerged. To take it a step further, inspired once again by Escher, the logo design was adapted to allow tessellation – providing a distinct, brand-led pattern device for use across marketing collateral.

Budget was limited with no allowance for expensive food photography. To maintain a clean, consistent, and bold look to the dishes a technique employed by sushi restaurants was adopted. Shooting the dishes from above allowed for clean cut-outs to be placed on hyper backdrops of turquoise and magenta to accompany the orange.

For the menu, I wanted something fun, different, and easy to update. Using a fan style allowed for simple updates for new menus, clean layouts and genuine shots of India to be displayed on the reverse of each pane to connect with the heritage and tradition of the cuisine.

To ensure the new branding strategy was successfully deployed online, I worked with regular collaborator James Seddon at Cotton Creative to develop the website – view the case study.