Recent work: Rice Paper Scissors

"Inspired by the sidewalk dining and street food we experienced in Vietnam, we wanted to recreate the experience here in San Francisco — complete with small tables, even smaller stools, fresh Vietnamese condiments, Cambodian pop music, and a rotating menu of Vietnamese comfort foods"  - Rice Paper Scissors website.

Rice Paper Scissors was created by my dear high school friend Valerie Luu and her partner in crime, Katie Kwan. They have been hustling for 3 years now, and have built up quite the following. Their success as a pop-up mainstay, led them to getting their own semi-permanent space at a music venue right near my apartment in the Mission. They are currently serving food almost everyday, lunch Tuesday-Friday, and brunch on the weekends. A few months ago Valerie asked me to help them create a window sign for their restaurant to attract more people walking along the street. I of course gladly wanted to help! The little red stool that is now their logo mark, was actually inspired by a drawing I made for he poster of their first pop-up together ever. You can see we have some history together :)

Valerie and Katie wanted the sign to really stay true to the kind of signage work that they witnessed in their trips to Vietnam. The great hand-lettered examples they found were very inspiring.

I started off creating sketches with regular fonts just so I could get my ideas out. I told them that once we chose a direction from the first batch I would hand-letter and make the design feel more unique.

From this batch we were able to narrow down the concepts and so then I started hand-lettering.

From this round we had a few more slight tweaking and back and forth to finally come up with this design. 

Looking forward to seeing this sign up in their window! If you are in the SF Bay Area be sure to check out their lunch and brunch at Brick & Mortar Music Hall!