design + branding by Cindy Nguyen
<aside> 🚩 How do you create a grocery store brand that meets the needs of shoppers in a way that other existing brands haven’t yet already?
</aside>
Bình Minh Market is a grocery store brand dedicated to sharing the taste of Vietnam—traditional and modern—to communities who have never known it, missed it dearly, or always been curious. Whether you’re a young adult that misses the taste of home, a parent that needs ingredients for a big family dinner, or a 30-something year-old that’s never seen a jackfruit, they’ve got something for each and every one of you.
“For a taste of Vietnam, right at sunrise.”
taking a look at what other brands have done well and what they can do better.
Figure 1. Competitive analysis of the visual design of three popular Asian grocery store brands: 99 Ranch Market, H Mart, and Tokyo Central.
Figure 2. Mood board for Bình Minh Market
a brand that’s warm, comforting, nostalgic, and bright.
Figure 3. The entire style guide for Bình Minh Market, including its typography, color palette, logo variations, graphical elements, and design application.
<aside> 📌 the checklist
</aside>
Figure 4. All Vietnamese vowels with tones in Artifex Hand CF, the primary font.
Figure 5. All Vietnamese vowels with tones in Articulat CF, the secondary font.
Figure 6. Type test in English and Vietnamese for both of the primary (top) and secondary (bottom) fonts.
.png)
Figure 7. The color palette for Bình Minh Market, complete with hex codes and RGB values.
I wanted colors that would be warm and bright—colors that matched the tone of Bình Minh Market—so what better color than red? Here, red catches your attention and is reminiscent of the auspicious red envelopes with money (lì xì) given to the youth on Lunar New Year. Red also connects back to a sunrise (the English equivalent of bình minh), especially when paired with a bright and happy yellow. The inclusion of green, representative of the farmlands and fresh produce, completes the picture of an early sunrise peeking over an horizon as it makes its way up.
Figure 8. The primary logo set against different colored backgrounds to showcase the various allowed color combinations.
<aside> 🤔 why a rooster?
</aside>
In Vietnamese, bình minh (pronounced bin min) means sunrise. The crowing of a rooster is commonly associated with the coming of the latter, so it made perfect sense to have a rooster as the logo for Bình Minh Market.
From not-a-thought-in-its-head to, frankly, a little intimidating, Bình Minh Market’s rooster has come a long way to end up as its friendly, smiling self. Paired with type circling over its head (the rising sun) and horizontal type underneath (the horizon), the rooster transitions from brand mark to the primary logo.
Figure 9. Logo ideation, starting from the top left to the bottom right.
Figure 10. Word marks.