Brand Identity · Logo Design
Build a singular brand identity for a barbershop and cocktail bar, with one mark that holds the weight of both.
Role
Creative Direction · Brand Identity · Art Direction
Client
The Anguished Barber · Atlanta, GA
Industry
Hospitality · Barbershop · Food and Beverage
Deliverables
Logo · Identity System · Signage · Menus · Branded Glassware · Interior Direction
Recognition
Licensed Barbershop and Cocktail Bar
Overview
The Anguished Barber arrived as a brief unlike any other. The client was opening a barbershop with a full liquor license and presented his vision for the interior using a hand-built LEGO model. Every spatial decision in that model had meaning. That kind of client changes how you work.
Strategic Insight
The Anguished Barber is a barbershop and a bar in the same room, so the brand had to live in both worlds at once. Someone comes in for a cut and stays for a drink, or shows up for the drink and leaves with a fresh cut, and the identity has to carry them through the whole visit. That meant working past the logo into signage, menus, glassware, and the feel of the room itself, so the place reads as one experience instead of two businesses sharing a lease.
Brand Identity
The anguish is in the letterform.
Collaboration Note
Early logo exploration and sketch development included collaboration with Michael Steffen, a trusted creative partner I have worked with for more than twenty years. Mike has long been part of my go-to team for illustration, photography, and visual problem-solving, and his contribution helped shape the rough, expressive character that made the Anguished Barber mark feel alive.
Huge thanks to Mike for his eye, craft, and instincts.
Creative Direction
On the Logo
The anguish is in the geometry. The frown lives in the letterform. The teardrop on the A is a typographic gesture. One extra shape that changes everything about how the mark reads emotionally.
On Color
Lifted directly from the Dali canvas. Ochre, deep burgundy, smoke. Colors that belong in a room with low light and good whiskey.
On the Cocktail Menu
Designed to be held, not scanned. The weight of the paper matters. The brand should feel like the place.
On Glassware
A logo on a glass is only interesting if the logo earns that surface. This one does.
On Atmosphere
The LEGO model was the real brief. Every interior decision the client built into that model, proportions, adjacency, light sources, informed the brand direction. Rare that a client brings you something that precise.
Patterns · Typography · Pantones
Branding
Vibe · Environment
Built for the customer who wants an experience, not just a haircut.
Project Close
The Anguished Barber is the kind of project that proves what a brand can do when the concept is genuinely strange and the execution refuses to explain it. The asymmetry in the mark does not ask for your permission. The color does not apologize for where it came from. The whole system operates on the assumption that the right customer will get it immediately, and the wrong one was never the audience anyway.