Minnie Bird is a fried chicken restaurant offering a menu of sandwiches, tenders, dirty sodas, and a special treat—free ice cream with every meal. The restaurant is partly owned by Sean Thomas (great grandson of Wendy's founder Dave Thomas) and named after his great-grandmother Minnie Sinclair. Opened in October of 2024, Minnie Bird is located in Schaumburg, Illinois.

The branding was created by Milwaukee-based designer Jim Kennelly. The Minnie Bird logo is custom lettering, but the featured font used in the headlines is Central Type's big, bold Dug. The body type is set in Tenso, but Etna, P22 Mackinac, and New Spirit are sprinkled in throughout.

“FINISH WITH A SCOOP” is Dug. Lines at the top and bottom are in italic caps from Tenso. “FREE ICE CREAM” and “Text Us!” are Etna. The phone number is set in P22 Mackinac.

Hand-lettered Dug painted in the store’s interior.

From The Brand Identity:

Digital corner store and delivery service Foxtrot have partnered with Chicago’s artisanal cocktail bar The Violet Hour to devise a whisky blend of Kentucky straight bourbon. Tasking Milwaukee-based multi-disciplinary creative Jim Kennelly to help tell their story, the resulting identity is one referential to The Violet Hour’s pre-prohibition-style attitude to whisky, while being fundamentally celebratory of the liquor’s hometown of Chicago.

Finding its graphic voice through vintage printed materials, such as newspapers and liquor labels, Kennelly’s typographically-led identity and bottle design demonstrates creative strength in the nonchalance of its aesthetic. Combining characterful illustration and tender typography to create something both familiar and visually distinct.

Discussing the influence from vintage newspapers, Kennelly tells us that knowing the solution was going to be typographically focused, “we had to create a look that allowed us to give consumers multiple points of information as quickly as possible,” Kennelly explains. “We immediately were drawn to the idea of treating this as a sort of tabloid,” he adds, “using headlines and visual hierarchy to tell consumers what they need to know through an editorial format,” noting the aesthetic reference to America’s prohibition era.

With this in mind, Kennelly opted for Epoque Black as the primary typeface alongside Agipo Bold Condensed for the secondary headlines, with the editorial-esque construction of both lending themselves to the overarching chosen aesthetic.