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Sunken Harbor Club Menus

A yearlong exploration of tiki themes for a local institution

Client

Fort Defiance

Timeline

2018–2019

Role

A baker's dozen of menus for the once-a-month tiki night at Red Hook's legendary cocktail bar and restaurant, Fort Defiance. I was thrilled to be able to work with the team at Fort Defiance on putting each of these together and explore the themes and vibes of a special event close to my heart.

Each month was designed based on new menu text provided by the head bartender. Repeated themes included the use of a limited color palette focusing on light and vibrant blues, use of decorative typefaces, columnar layouts which allowed playful placement of menu elements, and exploring visual ways of evoking being underwater with textual orientation and layout.

  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for June 2018. Menu is presented in a stylized, angled underwater shape with the S in Sunken Harbor club breaking the horizontal waterline positioned 1/3 from the top of the page
  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for July 2018. Menu is presented in five columns with a stylized light blue ocean map in the background, with inverted historical drawings of sea monsters as ornamentation.
  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for August 2018. Menu is presented in 4 vertically staggered columns with Sunken Harbor Club in large script in the background.
  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for September 2018. Menu is presented in 2 columns with an art nouveau lettering treatment of Sunken Harbor Club in the bottom center of the menu.
  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for October 2018. Menu is laid out simply in 2 columns but has small ripples emanating from the lower left corner, affecting the text.
  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for November 2018. Menu is presented in 3 columns with The Sunken Harbor Club in white in the background reversed vertically compared to the text of the menu items.
  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for December 2018. Menu christmas themed with custom lettering and stylized illustrations of mistletoe.
  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for January 2019. Menu is presented in five columns with The Sunken Harbor Club in the two outermost columns in reversed orientation from the rest of the menu.
  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for February 2019. Menu is presented in four columns with The Sunken Harbor Club aggressively angled downward in white in the background.
  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for March 2019. Menu is presented in four columns staggered vertically with The Sunken Harbor Club oriented perpendicularly, one word in each column. Background image shows a woman floating underwater.
  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for April 2019. Menu is presented in two angled columns with each column oriented opposite from each other with The Sunken Harbor Club in white in the background.
  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for May 2019. Menu is presented in four columns with The Sunken Harbor Club in the column second from right in reversed orientation from the rest of the menu.
  • Sunken Harbor Club menu for June 2019. Menu is presented in four columns with drinks at the top and food options at the bottom, oriented vertically opposite from each other. The Sunken Harbor Club text is split between each of cour corners and stylized with an underwater effect.

Ian Crowther is an art director and designer for product, web, and print.