The Old Prices Fork Elementary School in Blacksburg, VA is being transformed into a community space to live, work, eat, and gather. One component of this renovation is a shared-use, commercial kitchen for food entrepreneurs called Millstone Kitchen. The site opened in July 2019. Leadership for the Old School revitalization project, along with a handful of community members, had met and worked through numerous brand exercises to come up with the name, mission, brand values, brand words, and more for this kitchen. They reached out to Framework Creative to create the logo based on these brand elements.

I set to work designing the primary and alternate logos based on their target clients, as well as key words and phrases from their branding analysis, including fresh, healthy, small batch, local, community, and “heritage and tradition in a contemporary setting.” I created two concepts, and after presenting to leadership, we moved forward with revising the one they felt best represented the organization. It features a cast iron skillet with the outline of a millstone as a the main logo emblem. This is contrasted by the leaf as the dot in the word “kitchen” to represent local, healthy foods. I chose a simple san serif font contrasted by a handwriting font to bring in a contemporary look. I created versions with and without the tagline, as well as several alternate logos for use in settings of various sizes. I chose a brand color palette with greens, reds, and yellows to represents the colors of the foods, as well as grays to represent the kitchen equipment in the space.

Learn more about the Millstone Kitchen by visiting their website.