Mister Bianco
Brand Identity & Creative Direction
After thirteen years on High Street in Kew, Mister Bianco relocated to a two-storey corner site on Cotham Road – expanding into a three-part venue comprising a restaurant, cocktail bar, and upstairs event space. The move marked a new era, requiring a refreshed identity capable of honouring its Sicilian heritage while elevating its presence through spatial, digital and visual expression. As Creative Director, I led concept development, identity design, messaging, and spatial coordination across the full reimagining of the brand.
Art Direction
Brand Identity
Brand Systems
Creative Direction
Digital
Graphic Design
Illustration
Interiors
Materials Selection
Menu Design
Naming
Signage & Wayfinding
Social Media
Strategy
Typography Design
Uniforming
Website Design & UI
ADDITIONAL PROJECT CREDITS
Mills Gorman Architects (Interiors)
Grafico (Signage)
MenuCorp (Menu Covers)
Kristoffer Paulsen, Silvia Zanon, Jessie Evans (Digital Photography)
Dynamite Digital (Web Development)
Gary Bigeni (Uniforms)
Sunday Lunch (PR)
The challenge was to create a unified identity that could bring coherence and distinction to three connected spaces in the main dining room (Mister Bianco), the cocktail bar (Bianchetto), and the event space (Sala). The system needed to feel anchored in Sicilian culture while expanding into a more contemporary, architectural language fitting for a venue of this scale.
Positioned at a key road junction and with a tram stop outside, the geographic and architectural context of the new site became the starting point for this project. This context connected with a conceptual foundation drawn from Italian rationalist architecture — particularly major rail stations such as Venezia Santa Lucia, Firenze Santa Maria Novella, and Roma Termini. This informed the brief delivered to Mills Gorman Architects and became the basis for an identity rooted in heritage, movement and space.
To guide differentiation across the three spaces, the brand narrative was built around Dante’s Divine Comedy — using Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso as symbolic frameworks.
To guide differentiation across the three spaces, the brand narrative was built around Dante’s Divine Comedy — using Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso as symbolic frameworks.
- Inferno for Mister Bianco — warm, energetic, grounded in Sicilian culinary tradition and cooking over fire
- Purgatorio for Bianchetto — moody, transitional, intimate; a bar defined by transformation
- Paradiso for Sala — bright, celebratory, light-filled; a refined space for events and gatherings
Each space was assigned its own emblem inspired by artisan pantograph mark-making. These symbols sit within a flexible, layered identity system supported by a custom municipal-inspired typeface (MB Block), DJR Forma Medium, and the delicate GT Alpina Thin.
Colour palettes were developed from classical artworks corresponding to each part of Dante’s poem — warm reds and earth for Inferno, deep greens and cool greys for Purgatorio, and soft whites and gold for Paradiso. This extended into print, photography direction, environmental graphics, collateral, uniforms, and campaign artwork.
Menus were designed as literary objects with leatherbound covers, brass hardware, and selected excerpts from The Divine Comedy, reinforcing the narrative thread throughout the guest experience. Campaigns adopted the tone of mid-century Italian posters, using illustration, photography, film stills and cultural references to bring personality and place to the fore.
Digital presence was reimagined through a redesigned Mister Bianco website and a dedicated site for Bianchetto – emphasising photography, simplifying navigation, and bringing the brand’s new spatial and visual language to life in a new digital space.
The rebrand positions Mister Bianco as a richly layered, architecturally-informed hospitality destination with a distinct sense of place and cultural lineage. The system unifies three venues through a shared conceptual and visual language while giving each its own identity and tone.
The result is a coherent brand world expressed through space, form, materiality, and narrative – a comprehensive reimagining that signals Mister Bianco’s next chapter and strengthens its presence within Melbourne’s dining landscape.