Studio Lob’s branding for Nonna’s pizza restaurant celebrates grandma’s tomatoes… and her dentures

Pizza and grandmas are two of the best things in life – a fact celebrated in Studio Lob’s branding for a new Neapolitan restaurant on the Azores island of São Miguel, Nonna’s Pizza. The restaurant wanted to “pay tribute” to their grandmothers, and everyone else’s, creating an eatery that was light and easy, with a small menu and a few cheap wines. Studio Lob led with a lighthearted visual look that nodded to a few universal truths; that grandma’s food is always the best, and that their teeth are usually fake.

To sneak this funny line into the branding, Lob’s founder Jannis Zell and Phil Zumbruch included simple red and black line drawings of teeth, which (conveniently) have a striking similarity to Naples’ San Marzano variety of tomatoes. These teeth-tomatoes feature across the brand: from the top of menus with the restaurant’s name enclosed, to custom t-shirts and loyalty cards. “It’s referring to the cliche of grandmothers’ tomatoes and grandmothers’ dentals,” says Jannis. “At the same time it’s obvious; you eat your pizza with your teeth, tomatoes are one of the main ingredients to be put on a pizza.”

Alongside the more pared back illustrations, the branding centres some fun, more fully-fleshed mascots. “It felt right to have mascots as carriers of the identity, and not so much stiff logo applications that are designed for big corporations or brands,” says Phil. There’s the grandma tomato, a grinning cartoon tomato with charming smile lines, a bright red version of which features on stickers, while a line-drawing version sits inside gift cards, a large speech bubble protruding from its mouth, ready and waiting for a loving message.

Jannis and Phil kept the grandma storyline going even into the typographic choices. In the main they used Gruppo Due’s G2 Erika mono for its likeness to the font of a typewriter, “your grandmother might have used”. This is then paired with 205TF’s Clifton italic for its hints of “Italo-western romantic”, says Jannis.

One particularly fun aspect of the project arose after Jannis and Phil paid a visit to São Miguel island in the Azores. “We had a nice evening in a sports bar where we bought some scratchers,” says Jannis. “I think we won like €2 that went into a new ticket. A lot of people love scratchers on São Miguel.” So, they took the scratch card idea and made it their own, creating a bright yellow card adorned with the grandma tomato mascot to promote the opening of the restaurant. With the winning chances placed at a favourable 50:50, if you got three smiling tomatoes, you won a free margarita pizza, if you got one crying tomato – bad luck! The scratch cards are the cherry on top of an inventive branding project that somehow successfully pulls together tomato mascots, a typewriter font, dental drawings, and grandmas – all in the name of pizza.