Sruthi Art Studios

In 2020, I received an interesting project to create a logo for a local home catering business providing authentic Indian cuisine.

The client had established her business in April 2017; expanding within the local community offering home cooked food for both business and social events. The growth was partly down to a good menu of varied street food and traditional Indian dishes on offer for different customers. The shortage of authentic flavours in Indian cuisine in the area had aided the expansion of the business, along with the added advantage of offering foods regional to different areas of India.

Shilpam and I began our discussions based on the logos used by other business offering Indian food, the cart selling street food and the chef hat with a fork and knife were popular digital imagery for a catering business. On further exploration we agreed to create a hand drawn imagery for the logo. I suggested pen and inks with watercolour as a good medium to capture tones and vibrant colours. Shilpam was thereafter presented couple of rough sketches of traditional Indian cutlery, vegetables and designs with bubble writing capturing the business name, ‘ Desi Flavorz’. In the end we settled on the traditional pot which incorporated everything that signified Indian cuisine.

The pot is symbolically an aesthetic imagery in Indian art, representing auspiciousness and abundance. In the Vedas it is referenced as the ‘source of life’, represented with the Goddess Lakshmi the provider of wisdom and prosperity. It was deemed a fitting imagery for a business providing pure vegetarian meals. The client was also keen to work with shades of the saffron and orange as they were her favourite colours. So I presented a few different variations of the pot with the business alphabets in bubble writing. In the end we finalised on a cooking pot on wood, signifying Mother Earth and the steam presenting the aroma of the food. The final work was completed in watercolours with ink and pen.

This was submitted and accepted after approval in Feburary 2020, couple of weeks before the country went into its first lockdown. The client unfortunately had to shut her business due to risk of exposure and shortage in keen ingredients. Within a few weeks she resumed her business providing free food for NHS workers, the charitable enterprise running until summer. Thereafter the original catering business resumed in full swing.

We have since created a digital image of the original logo for distribution material. Designing a logo was a creative challenge but the determination of the client to have sustained a business in an extremely difficult year commendable.

Shilpam Bidasaria was honoured by the Rotary winning the Maidenhead Covid – 19 heroes in the Open Category for the food she provided to the NHS workers through the first lockdown.