Menus inspire bites of creativity
For Brooklyn-based graphic artist DERICK HOLT, hours spent in restaurant kitchens ultimately led to heaps of local design work. INK talked with him over snacks at three restaurants, then asked him to share some design treats.
When Virginia-native Derick Holt moved to Brooklyn 10 years ago, he wasn’t quite ready to make a living off his design work. He was fresh out of college and didn’t have contacts in New York City’s design circles. So, he went to the next place he knew he’d feel comfortable: restaurant kitchens.
Holt had grown up cooking. His mother went to culinary school, he flipped burgers in high school and worked for a caterer throughout college. He got his first job as a dishwasher at Diner, a hip comfort-food spot at the foot of the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge, housed in a 1920s train car. He eventually worked his way onto the line.
“I never wanted to be a cook; it was just a job until I begged and begged them to let me do a T-shirt,” he says. Clearly, it was a hit. When Diner’s owners opened a second cafe, Marlow & Sons, in 2002, they hired Holt to do the branding. When the same group conceived of a food and culture quarterly called Diner Journal, Holt headed up the art direction for nearly four years. Now he’s long since quit the kitchen work to do graphic design full time, most often for restaurants.
“I’m almost like an ambulance chaser, I see a restaurant open up, and I’m knocking on the door.” His work was featured in fall 2010 at the Herb Lubalin Study Center at the Cooper Union in the exhibit “Appetite: A Reciprocal Relationship Between Food & Design.” INK spoke with Holt over snacks at three restaurants in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Then, we handed him a pen and a napkin and forced him to design on the fly.
INK: So much of your design is food-related, do you consider yourself a foodie at all?
DERICK HOLT: “I’m obsessed with food I suppose. I cook all the time. I'm not obsessed with restaurants, though. I'm much more into cooking at home and going to the farmers’ market and just experimenting. I cook constantly. You’d think I'd go to restaurants all the time but I actually try not to eat out.
INK: How do you get inspired for a job? Do you get to taste the food before designing a menu?
DH: “Well, usually you can’t taste the food because they’re not open. Only if you went in for a redesign would you taste the whole menu. As far as inspiration, I look at a lot of vintage things. I think the level of design and the quality of printing was a lot higher then than it is today.
I do a lot of searching for vintage menus and other vintage ephemera. I buy old cookbooks all the time. I try to immerse myself in the concept as best I can. Some people have a really fleshed-out story behind the restaurant, and that really helps. When I do branding for restaurants, I stay away from trendy stuff because I don’t want it to feel stale after a couple of years, which can happen with graphic design because it’s so influenced by style and fashion. Honestly, it’s mostly just going on the Internet and typing in “vintage (something)”.
INK: What’s important to consider when designing for restaurants?
DH: “Some of the best restaurants feel like they’ve been there forever. I see myself as specializing in branding, and I think some of the best brands have a heritage aspect to them, like Coca-Cola or Ford, there’s depth there. When I come at design projects, I know I can’t create a fake heritage, but I like to try to think about what the influences would have been, and try to craft something together doesn't look as if a modern designer with modern typefaces made it. A lot of times that means I'm doing a lot of custom typefaces.
Coming from a culinary background, restaurateurs see me as a little more qualified because I used to be a cook. Whether it really adds to the design or not, I don’t know, but I love food, and it certainly helps me get my foot in the door.
INK: Do you find similarities in food and design?
DH: “The way I design, I sort of craft things and I take a little influence from here and a little influence from there. It’s a matter of finesse a lot of times, much like cooking. In order to be a good chef you have to have a lot of knowledge about what flavors go together and it’s similar for design. I've had a lot of influences over the years, and I’ve been experimenting, mixing and trying new things, just like a chef would do. But there are way more differences than similarities.
INK: And both are kind of subjective, no?
DH: “Yes. Some designers can be super professional and make something very slick, but it’s kinda boring. Much like food. You could roast a chicken perfectly, with the skin super crispy and some nice herbs, but it’s just, like, a boring roast chicken.
INK: So, will you draw some on-the-fly designs for us on these restaurant napkins?
DH: “(Staring intently at napkin). Hmm, what is this? A menu? A web site? They’re all so different. If I’m doing a postcard, I want it to be something people will grab and take home and hang on their refrigerator. Matchbooks — same thing — a good giveaway. Menus are all about fitting in the space. A coffee cup, you want it to clearly advertise on the street. And then when it gets crushed on the corner curb, where they all end up when the trash cans overflow, you want it to look really good on the curb.