Rossi’s Ice Cream

Rossi's is a well established ice cream shop in North Belfast and has been delighting customers in the area with homemade Italian ice cream since circa 1888. Although the ice cream has always been a stand out success in the area the shop and image of Rossi's had become a little less attractive than the lure of the ice cream itself over the years.

We were approached by owners Anita and Andrew who had a vision for what their shop needed to look like but needed a few persuasive and visual prompts in order to make that vision a reality.

We felt the shop firstly needed to have a brand that was in keeping with the heritage of the product, "Rossi's Homemade Italian Ice Cream, Est 1888". We created a simple but effective logo based on a lucid, natural hand script which was firstly handwritten and then digitised to work across all media with a complimentary, modern, Sans Serif font underneath. The design of the logo itself draws inspiration from Italian American restaurants and ice cream parlours from the turn of the century. Once the logo was on it's way we were in a much better position to think about colour palettes, finishes and styling of the shop interior. We wanted the shop to be clean, modern and fresh with a subtle nod to an earlier period of ice cream parlour. This can be clearly seen by the use modern, cool grey and white finishes juxtaposed with the brick tiles and cream solid surface counter tops.

During the project we used a combination of design sketches, visual rendering techniques and specification planing to get the ultimate sign off from our client which we were then able to refine in order to produce final workshop drawings. Once we had sign off we were able to build everything in our workshop prior to install for our client to see that it was a suitable, practical working solution. This is extremely helpful from a logistics point of view as it affords us the luxury of knowing that everything works before we go to site.

We feel that we have created something that works extremely well and Rossi's has now got an extendable brand (easily replicable for future business ventures) and shop interior which is in keeping with it's mouthwateringly good ice cream!