What’s better than hot, fresh pizza? How about hot, fresh branding! Papa Johns thinks so, at least, unveiling a futuristic new look and feel for the pizza chain with an updated logo and completely revamped layout for their restaurants this past week.
While the “Welcome to the Dough Show” sign is a bit of an eye-roll if you ask me, some elements of the new restaurant layout make plenty of sense, like the pizza warming stations where customers can pick up their to-go orders. The restaurants will have open-concept layouts akin to pizza start-ups and will provide customers with a back-of-house view so they can see where the magic happens.
The new modernized logo from Su Mathews Hale is bold and clean, leaning into the flat logo trend that allows for flexibility across digital platforms and in the restaurants themselves. The revamped iteration has ditched the word “pizza” from atop the wordmark, and the green border got the chop as well.
The possessive apostrophe after “John” has also been removed, clearly as a means of distancing the brand even further from its controversial founder and former CEO, John Schnatter, as he used the N-word on a conference call in 2018.
A new color palette was developed and incorporated throughout the branding and visual identity from London’s forpeople, inspired by Papa Johns’ ingredients—green for basil, red for tomatoes, and white for dough. Their new font alludes to the stretchy dough, and illustrated icons of ingredients like garlic, cheese, and peppers get liberally sprinkled into the updated interiors.
You can expect to start seeing this new era of Papa Johns for yourself at the end of the year and into 2022, as this will be a soft conversion that happens gradually throughout Papa Johns’ locations over time.
Papa Johns is just one in a long list of fast-food chains that have revamped their branding recently, with Burger King getting in on the action earlier this year and McDonald’s unwrapping some hip new packaging themselves.
So what are the big takeaways from these fast food branding trends? Simple, flat, and clean. Essentially the opposite of how you feel after eating at any of them.