In preparation for its recent expansion into the Northern Territory, we were tasked with refreshing the iconic business’ brand identity and a range of marketing collateral spanning its website, menus, gift cards, signage systems and more.

For its foundational brand identity, we paired a strong “Oyster Bar” wordmark with a hand-drawn oyster, illustrated in a stippled style reminiscent of early works of cartography, used to communicate a feeling of the sea.

Like a person’s fingerprint, each oyster shell is distinct. Drawing inspiration from this, we developed a series of hand-illustrated oysters, and assigned each Oyster Bar location its own. On the surface, this provides Oyster Bar with a single overarching brand identity, but subtly gives each location its own sense of individuality and personality.

Food is a notoriously difficult subject matter to photograph, and oysters doubly so, meaning photography was a key deliverable of this project.

With the majority of Oyster Bar’s customers traditionally gravitating to familiar flavours, such as natural and Kilpatrick, we followed the “people eat with their eyes” adage and developed a completely visual menu to encourage a greater understanding of, and experimentation with, some of Oyster Bar’s more adventurous flavour combinations.

In addition to its menus, the project’s striking photography has been used across a range of mediums, including a launch advertising campaign across the back of metropolitan buses.

Finally, the photography and menus are shared with the public via a national website. All three locations are serviced by a single content management system (CMS), and while they are customised with localised information and imagery, they feature a consistent design throughout. The website is built around an understanding of what a visitor is typically looking for, and facilitates access to menus, location details, and promotions. Each location's homepage also integrates closely with Facebook, pulling the latest photo and status update from their respective Facebook page. We also developed and designed competition pages that capture a visitor's details, and subscribes each user to future email marketing campaigns.

As part of Oyster Bar’s broader launch campaign, we made use of this functionality in a major “1,000 Oyster Giveaway” promotion, which ran concurrently across three states. This promotion was run primarily on Facebook, and saw a dozen oysters given away to 3 people every day for 3 months. This generated a national social media buzz, an immediate burst of customers into its new locations, and a significant bolstering of its network of Facebook fans and email marketing subscribers, providing a foundation for ongoing marketing and and communication initiatives.