Taranto's

The menu, rebuilt from scratch. A trifold that has to carry subs, lunch combos, a kids' menu, take-and-bake, desserts, catering, build-your-own pizza at four sizes, specialty pizzas, entrees, appetizers, salads, soups and drinks, and still be readable by somebody holding it at a table.

The hard part of a menu this dense is hierarchy. Every item wants to be a heading. The ones that earn it are the categories a customer is scanning for, and everything else drops a level. The cover panel carries the mark and the food photography and nothing else, so the piece opens as a brand and unfolds into a price list.

Promotional work that runs on top of the menu: in-store posters, seasonal and limited-time offers, and co-branded pieces where a partner's mark has to sit next to the restaurant's without either one losing.

The Cinco de Mayo taco pizza promotion is the one that shows the constraint. It is a limited-time item with a date range, a co-brand, a product shot, an address block and a call to action, all on a single poster read from across a dining room. Everything on it competes for the same few seconds, so the decision that matters is what gets to be large. The offer won that, over the logo.

Alternate marks, drawn for the places the primary logo does not go. The main lockup is a full wordmark in a banner with a tagline under it, which is right on a menu cover and wrong on anything small, square, or aimed at children.

The variants solve those cases one at a time: a single illustrated character mark, built from the same pizza and the same two brand colors, that reads at any size and in any orientation without the wordmark beside it. A variant that only works when the original is also present is a decoration.