Mani
A family bakery in Hidalgo. The identity had to look handmade without looking amateur, which is a narrower gap than it sounds.
- Client
- Mani
- Sector
- Bakery, family owned
- Year
- 2025
- Engagement
- Brand identity and icon system
- Delivered
- Brand identityLogo and sealColour systemTwelve piece icon set
The problem
Mani is a small family owned bakery in Hidalgo. The product is made by hand in small quantities, and that is the whole proposition. The risk with a business like this is that the branding either flattens it into something that could be a supermarket line, or leans so far into rustic that it stops looking like a business at all.
Handmade and amateur look similar from a distance. Landing between them is the entire job.
The decisions
Everything in the identity is drawn as a single continuous stroke with the wobble left in. Not a typeface, not a geometric construction. The M loops back on itself the way piped icing does, and it sits inside a scalloped seal borrowed from the crimped edge of a pastry.
The stroke weight stays consistent and the curves are controlled, which is where the professionalism comes from. It looks hand drawn because it is. Nothing about it is careless.
An icon set, not just a logo
A bakery has to label things. Products, categories, packaging, a menu board, a sticker on a bag. So the delivery included twelve icons drawn in the same hand: the chef's hat, the whisk, the tools and objects of the trade, each one a single line that matches the mark.
This is the part small businesses underestimate. One logo gets you a sign. A set of marks drawn in the same hand gets you a shop.
What was delivered
Primary mark and wordmark, a colour system with navy and dusty rose variants, and a twelve piece icon set supplied as vectors for print and screen.
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