I was a huge fan of La Tortilla Factory long before I was drawing letters professionally. I loved the warm character of their existing logo. It's truly a family run business, and their was a certain authenticity that the old design provided, but as time went on and their product line expanded, it made sense to redraw the lettering keeping as much warmth as possible, and simply cleaning up the edges. When they were looking for an illustrator to handle the abuela, I enthusiastically recommended my good friend Matt Cantrell. Matt’s pedigree is in skulls, demons, naked women, and eagles, superbly drawn with his Windsor Newton No. 7, but I knew he had the chops to handle anything.
La Tortilla Factory
Completed
2017
Client
La Tortilla Factory
Creative Direction
Revel
Deliverable
Logotype
The original. How could this possibly be improved? Well, I guess you could remove Abuela’s mustache. The lettering is clumsy, but in an approachable way—which is exactly what I wanted to maintain.
Initial sketches began played with the existing composition, and altering weight and contrast. Ultimately, we ended up in place quite close to the original.
We then explored the difference between drawing corners soft and round (left), versus clear and sharp (right). At this point, the original was an autotrace of a scan of a fax of a smoke signal, so the image quality had deteriorated significantly, but that also gave it a bit of ”No se que.”
A single line version was drawn for places situations where the logotype would be used without the illustration.
It’s incredible to see the full system working together. The packaging went through a major overhaul, but it’s nice to see that they were able to keep a large part of what made the logo feel right in the first place. Photo courtesy Revel.