Hildegard's Bakery bakes bread and pizza using organic flours and grains in a wood-fired brick oven in a plant-filled bakery at the corner of Portage & Maryland. Serving as the urban home of Integrity Foods, a farm and organic baking operation in Riverton, MB, Hildegard's supplies dozens of retailers, restaurants, and cafes in Winnipeg and the surrounding area with organic baking of all kinds. The bakery is known for creative uses of sourdough and spelt and for its now-iconic wood-fired pizza.
I was approached by owner/operators Judith and David Newsom to assist in creating a brand, exterior signage, and menu system as well as provide some informal feedback on the layout of the cafe's interior. We began work before renovations on the Portage and Maryland location had begun.
Constrained by a low budget, the challenge in creating branding and graphics was primarily in harmonizing with Integrity Foods, which has always walked the tightrope between family-owned down to earth familiarity in person but cosmopolitan touch on their website and branding and labelling. The clients wanted to avoid pretension and nauseating trends, while still hoping to project class and taste.
The new bakery's namesake, St. Hildegard of Bingen, was known for proto-feminist thinking and her contribution to medieval wisdom on baking, cultivation, and natural healing. The clients wanted to hybridize a cafe/bakery aesthetic with some vaguely medieval vibes. My explorations reflect that intention.
After trying a number of approaches, the "h" logo was decided upon. It combines a basic calligraphy-like shape with a myriad of clustered symbols that could be either loaves or leaves all locked inside of a more formal box.
Symbolically it is an analogue for the cafe - a relatively geometric and modern space that contains within it an earthy oven built by human hands, filled to the brim with bread.
The solid alternative is used whenever the logo is printed on glass or reflective surfaces so that the details are not lost in reflections or objects directly behind the glass.
The vinyl signage on the bakery's windows was inspired by tex layouts seen on Integrity Foods website and farm locations at the time, and were tested and refined with mockups on site before being sent off to professionals for printing and installation.
Unlike a lot of bakeries or cafes, Hildegard's customer contact points are in the middle of an open space, just in front of its oven and work area, and menus therefore have to hang from the ceiling. The menu at launch involved a single menu cluster with two columns of modular boards mixing fixed sections done in vinyl lettering and changeable zones for chaulk. The expectation at launch was that bread offerings would change frequently, with little change to pastries and beverages. There were plans for baked pizza, but Hildegard's wouldn't develop flavours and start selling pies until months after opening.
Everything changes
After opening to explosive popularity, Hildegard's soon discovered all offerings would be changing reguarly, and pizza would grow to become a eniter category unto itself. Staff were struggling to keep the patchwork main menu running while also keeping newly added website menus, instagram menus, takeaway menus, and in-cafe menus up to date and consistent with each other. Time and energy were appropriately spent on simply managing the bakery's breakaway success.
In creating version 2 in spring of 2020, the primary objectives were to increase overall space, create a unified format that addressed all possible needs, and make edditing and producing multiple menus easier and less time-consuming.
A modular system
In this new system, one core edittable menu furnishes several satellite menu frames sized for particular uses--main cafe menu, takeaway menu, online menu, and instragram menu, etc.--that contain embedded blocks from the core edittable menu. These frames contain some contextual specific text (opening hours and phone numbers for a takeout menu, wayfinding for the large main bakery menus, etc.) and can colour swap fonts and backgrounds in embedded blocks from black to white when necessary.
Quick turnarounds
Updating this system is incredibly simple - just update the blocks in the core edditable menu, refresh the embedding on any required frame, and export that frame. The whole system was built in Affinity Publisher, an affordable but fully capable alternative to Adobe Indesign subscription, and all files and software are hosted and managed onsite at Hildegard's. This frame and blocks systems is responsible for all primary menus.
Chaulk is still used in many places, and we decided that this is acceptable. A design system like the one we created together lives at the very edge of practicality, especially with a business like a bakery, where things change rapidly and where some chaos is a byproduct of a very appropriate emphasis on quality of product.
The same goes for additional printed graphics that are made to appear in single places. Hildegard's operators and I have an ongoing open dialogue about what kind of solution might one day be found to making these graphics easier to produce on-site. In the mean time, they're focussing on developing products.
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