Murder & Pestle

Designing for the story.

When I moved back to Texas in mid-2019 I quickly reunited with a few old friends from the Austin culinary scene. Through this reinvigorated social scene I was introduced to a pair of Austinites who worked in the kitchen scene of my immediate neighborhood for many years. These two were known to frequently entertain at the bar within earshot by telling a smattering of interesting stories from their time in the food and beverage industry, some of these tales were darker than others.

Over the next few years, I would work through my early design journey, completing a degree program at Austin Community College. Soon after graduating, those same two Austin cooks would approach me with a great new idea, they were starting a podcast and wanted to hire me to design the entire identity. I was excited to work on something fresh and quickly agreed to start the ideation process.

Interestingly enough, after some early ideation, I came to the conclusion that the overall aesthetic and identity would work best if it was nearly completely on the nose. I began with sketching out and eventually fully illustrating variations of skulls as well as mortar and pestle combinations. In some of the best effective iterations, the pestle would be impacting the skull and tying the two keywords of murder and pestle together in a very literal way.

I landed at the examples you see here to the left. I enjoyed making these designs, and they are special to my project history in that they were very literal interpretations of the product. The only empathic moments during the design came about when assuming the position of a future listener, and even then, I came to conclusion that a simple design would be the most impactful. At the time of writing this the website and podcast are still in development, but you may be able to catch an episode or see the identity in action here.