Rebranding London's most famed restaurant.
Branding
Creative Direction
Design
The Ivy has been a fixture of London life among scenesters since 1917. A century on, Caprice Holdings were preparing to take the brand nationwide, opening Ivy Brasseries and Ivy Cafés opening across the UK, and the original West Street restaurant undergoing an extensive refurbishment. A few months before reopening, the Caprice Holdings brand team approached Plus to refine and modernise the visual identity for The Ivy and The Ivy Club.
We began where the brand began — the wordmark. The classic IVY lettering was redrawn entirely by hand, preserving its authority while bringing it into the modern era. The colour palette was updated to match. The iconic harlequin window emblem was also redrawn and rationalised: a multi-coloured symbol reduced to a single, decisive pink. Simple and more confident. To anchor the centennial moment, we developed an EST. 1917 lock-up, a device to carry the weight of a hundred years.
The Ivy has always had a close relationship with British art – its owners, chefs and maîtres d’ woven into the cultural fabric of the scene for decades. For this new era, it felt right to honour that connection. A modern British restaurant deserved a modern British artist. We approached Damien Hirst with the proposition of bringing his iconic Spot paintings into the identity, used across the menu design, and hung in the newly refurbished restaurant as its centrepiece.
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