Dinette Restaurant Business Card

March 9, 2018
By: Jennifer Wong

The 6^th Studio designed these business cards for Dinette, a restaurant in Milan with a typical homemade cuisine.

The owners of the restaurant, Luigi and Filippo, chose the name ‘Dinette’ for their restaurant. It’s an old fashioned name, it refers to a small dining room in the houses of Milan.

“The payoff is “Cucina di ringhiera”, which means cuisine from the banister,” said Emanuele, the Creative Director of the 6th Studio. “The old typical houses in Milan have banisters to connect all the doors of the apartments. So when you walk along the banister you pass in front of your neighbors’ kitchens, you can smell what food they are preparing,”

“…and sometimes steal leaves of basil from the vase outside the windows.” He joked.

At the same time, they worked on an iconography that could give the same feelings of familiarity.

“That’s why we handwrote the name “dinette” for the logo, and created the small icons of cloths hanging on a wire to dry after washing.”

“We also designed a set of hand drawn icons, with a few objects you could normally find on the Milanese banisters – a vase of geraniums, a tricycle, a paper pinwheel and a basket with a wire.”

Wait, a wired basket?

“Well, the oldest buildings didn’t have a lift (now they do). So people living on the highest floors used to drop down a basket to collect things brought by the shopkeepers, such as eggs and bread. On the back of the card there’s the printed graphic of a kitchen cloth, called “torcione”.”

How fascinating! Who would’ve thought that a business card design would contain so much interesting historical facts of one place?

These unique, vintage business cards were offset-printed on two coupled cardboards; with different icons printed on one side with a transparent and tactile varnish.