Taco Mix is a Harlem-born taco concept — a neighborhood joint built on authentically bold Mexican flavor with a New York edge. The project brief: design a complete brand system from scratch, from strategic positioning through visual identity to every real-world surface it touches.
The work lives across two documents: a 112-page Brand Strategy & Identity System covering competitive analysis, audience research, brand voice, logo development, and applications — and a 21-page Brand Guidelines document ready for production handoff.
Brand strategy & positioning
Logo system & icon variants
Color & typography system
Illustration & character art
Wild posting campaigns
Mobile app UI
Apparel, signage & packaging
Figma · Illustrator · InDesign
"Taco Mix serves bold, authentic Mexican flavors with the energy of Harlem — a welcoming community hub where quality tacos bring people together."
The fast-casual taco market competes on volume and speed. Taco Mix's white space was the opposite — a brand with deep neighborhood roots, grounded in Harlem's actual culture rather than generic "authentic Mexican" positioning that any chain can claim.
The intersection of Harlem cultural identity and authentic Mexican flavor. Not a chain, not a copycat — a neighborhood institution from day one.
Harlem residents, commuters, and NYC food culture explorers aged 18–40. Authenticity-forward, community-driven, Instagram-native.
Bold, direct, community-first. The voice of a neighborhood joint that knows exactly who it is — confident without being loud, local without being exclusive.
The mark is an abstract face-form — expressive, playful, unmistakably Taco Mix. Three signal colors drawn from Mexican food culture and Harlem street energy carry the brand across every surface. Typography is heavy, confident, unapologetically urban.
The brand illustration system extends the logo's expressionist personality into full narrative scenes. Stylized figures — bold outlines, flat color, Harlem skyline silhouettes — carry the brand's energy across posters, campaigns, and environmental applications.
Wild posting is Harlem's native advertising medium — bold, street-level, impossible to ignore. The campaign uses three-panel installations where illustration, wordmark, and negative space divide the wall with equal authority. Each format reads alone or as a triptych.
The brand system extended to a native mobile experience. Three screens establish the digital identity: an animated icon splash, a welcome flow built on the brand's typographic system, and a checkout that brings the taco customization concept to life.
Animated logo mark on white as first impression, followed by "Your Taco Your Way · Collect Points · Get Deals" — the brand promise as onboarding copy, set in Saveur Sans against Sun Ray yellow.
Order flow — "Keep social distancing · Pick up from the window." Clean taco lineup, item total, delivery fee. Brand colors carry through every interactive state.
A complete brand lives across every surface a customer touches. Taco Mix was applied to apparel, environmental signage, and food packaging — each tested against the guidelines for color accuracy, logo usage, and tone.
The project demonstrates that brand strategy and visual identity carry equal weight — neither drives without the other. Taco Mix's identity holds because the visual system is grounded in a genuine positioning, not a generic aesthetic.
The resulting brand system scales from a single Harlem storefront to a multi-location urban concept, with a voice and visual language that works at any size — from a salsa container to a 10-foot wild posting wall.
Holding the whole system — strategy, identity, illustration, digital, physical — simultaneously revealed how much brand coherence depends on one designer carrying it all at once. Execution fragments when no one holds the thread.
Anchoring identity in place — Harlem — rather than product category gave the brand a specificity that competitors can't replicate.
Wild posting demands different design thinking than digital — scale, context, and imperfection are features, not bugs.
133 pages total
7 application categories
Full system — brief to guidelines