Molly Kincaid | The Botanist

Turning over new tables and new leaves.

brand identity, illustration, motion, art direction

The Botanist

The challenge

The Botanist is a national bar and restaurant chain known for its immersive, Instagram-worthy interiors, theatrical cocktails, and menu of comforting pub classics. The Botanist’s previous identity struggled with a muted vintage colour palette and an ultra-feminine floral direction. The venues’ interiors have already evolved from a rustic potting shed to a grown-up botanical garden for today’s customer. The next chapter for The Botanist needs to feel fresh, more colour confident and aligned with the modern brand that The Botanist has become.

Shifting the focus onto botany, one challenge was introducing colour without flowers. I created a suite of modern illustrated leaves which directly reference historical botanical drawings. By designing these in two colourways, they are flexible enough to be used in multiple ways. The focus is now placed on the beautiful textures found within plants, organic and imperfect in nature, and they are predominantly used at a large scale to feel encompassing and contemporary. Subtle motion brings life and energy to the drawings in digital applications.

The Botanist becomes recognisable through the colour green, where it didn’t own a colour before. The suite of complementary secondary colours are inspired by nature and can turn up the volume when it’s needed, with a sunny yellow accent colour that aims to energise and uplift.

For the brand’s primary typography, I paired Moret with a motion style designed to mirror the way plants grow. This typeface is inspired by 20th century sign painting, reminiscent of the brand’s wall murals and the traditional visual language of gardens, and it strikes the perfect balance between classic and contemporary. Our secondary typeface is Aperçu, a modern take on classic realist typefaces such as Gill Sans, which was used widely in educational and scientific texts in the 1930's. This helps position us as knowledgeable, whilst bringing a vintage charm to brand output.

Within The Botanist’s venues, the identity’s highly decorative nature can be mobilised to tell a story. A cocktail menu concept based around the life cycle of a tree becomes a visual manual. The menu’s presentation is led by the wide range of flavour pairings, and guests are encouraged to make decisions based on this. Colour illustrations feel eclectic and little bit surreal, like they belong in the brand’s cabinets of curiosities tucked away in every corner.

The identity is able to flex and scale to fit any application, including at a local level via stripped-back Canva template guidance designed to empower sites to engage with their communities.