The Pawn Shop
The Pawn Shop a is bar and taqueria that is at once a call back to old Granville street as a strip of pawn shops and porn shops, a reflection of the current street’s fun-loving party culture, and a look into the future of the street’s colourful revival.
Ray and Peter wanted their space to channel a no-nonsense East LA taqueria that feels like a hidden treasure, with affordable and delicious food and drinks. Their mission with The Pawn Shop has always been first and foremost to create a space that is comfortable and fun for everyone, and doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Branding, Illustration, Print Design, Photography, Signage Design, Interiors Consultation
We worked to crystallize this feeling with the typography and logo that draw from the alternatingly rigid and fluid structures of Granville neon, crusty back alley scrawlings, chaotic pawn shop windows and classic tattoos.
The palette is a visual wayfinding tool, with food being represented by pink, drinks blue and tequila gold. Each weekly special has also been assigned a colour.
The illustrations created for this brand were designed to be scattered through the space and print like tags on a back-alley wall. They combine common pawn shop items smashed together with the food and symbols of the classic taqueria.
The praying hands and taxidermied chihuahua in particular are a tongue-in-cheek poke the highbrow and lowbrow of the Vancouver taco restaurant world, situating The Pawn Shop somewhere in between. The food is great, but we’re not being too fancy about it.
The illustrations for the weekly specials campaign are bright and polished, interpreting some imagery from the brand in a fresh way that represents the best of each night of the week. The posters were printed in the same way as wheat-paste show posters so they could be lacquered directly onto the walls of the bar, rather than framed.
The large mural that covers the entire entrance wall, one of several executed by Nelson Garcia, was used like many of the materials in the space to create a feeling of being simultaneously inside and outside. A chaotic mix of paste-ups, spray-overs and more complex graffitti images looks like a wall that has grown organically over time.
Several signs were created for the space, including interior and exterior vinyl, neon, marquee and water-cut steel. These all helped to advance the feeling of the street outside being a part of the interior of the bar.
