Turner's Pies
Food and drink brand guidelines for a pie maker with more than 90 years of equity and no rules.
Brand guidelines for a family business founded in 1933
Eva Turner sold her first steak and kidney pie at the Commercial Hotel in Bognor Regis in 1933. People kept coming back for it. Her son started making them at home to sell to local butchers, and by 1990 the family had opened a shop on Hawthorn Road with Turner's Pies over the door.
By 2018 there were three shops along the coast, a postal service and a Facebook page, and nobody had ever written down how any of it should look. So whoever was nearest made the sign, or the bag, with whatever was to hand. None of them were doing anything wrong, because there was nothing to follow.
The pies came out the same every time, and the wordmark over the door hadn't changed, but everything around it pulled a different direction. The cost of that was invisible on any one item, but obvious across all of them. Turner's could see it without being able to name the fix, so they called. And the obvious thing to do was the thing that would have done the most damage.
Leave the best part alone
The logotype didn't change. That was settled before a single rule got written, because a wordmark that's been over the same door for decades wasn’t a design problem waiting for a solution. It's the one thing in the business that was a constant. Turner's Pies needed rules, not a rebrand.
The obvious route for a bakery like this is a new brand identity. But the heritage was the strongest thing Turner's owned, and the wordmark is why someone spots the shop from across the road before they read anything else on it. So the logotype became the fixed point to work from. Every decision after that started with the same question: what does this have to do to sit next to the logo without conflicting with it?
Colours from the kitchen
Turner's didn't have a designer and wasn't going to hire one to read the document. The people using it would be a shop manager sizing a sign, or someone in the family writing a Facebook post. So every rule had to work for them, which ruled out anything needing a trained eye. That decided more of the system than taste did.
Garamond was already there, in the logotype. So the headings are Adobe Garamond Pro, and every page ends up carrying the same letterforms as the name at the top of it. Body copy is Hind, free on Google Fonts and installable on anything. Nobody at Turner's should need to buy a licence to write a Facebook post about a pie.
The colours came out of the kitchen. Water, Sage, Pastry, Coal and Flour, and the names mattered more than the hues, because someone who's never opened a brand identity guidelines document can still pick the right colour when it's called Pastry. Each one carries a tint range, so the palette stretches across packaging, signage and digital without anyone inventing a shade to fill a gap.
Logo usage rules cover clear space, measured against the squarest letter in the wordmark, a minimum size and a list of things never to do to it. They also fix where it sits on a photograph, always left, top or bottom. Nobody knew what the pictures would be, so the rule fixed the one thing that could be.
All of this ran through to the sub-brand, Pies By Post, bringing cohesion to the two brands. Everything from typography to layout is shared across both identities.
The rules went out in a paper bag
The Turner's Pies brand guidelines went where the pies went. Onto the bags with Bognor Regis, Chichester and Rustington printed down the side, onto the shopfront signs, onto the boxes going out by post.
Turner's has five shops now instead of three, with Broadwater and Petersfield added since 2018. And in 2024 Phil Turner took the company to the final of The Apprentice, which put the name in front of the whole country.
More work
Overtone
