Mario Sandoval News · Brand
Twenty-one years of the same grammar: Ideavia signs Coque's new identity
Coque launches a new identity and website without changing its brand. Both are by Ideavia, the gastronomic branding studio that has worked with the house since 2005, a year after Coque won its first Michelin star in Humanes. What is renewed is the application; the system —circles, semicircles and wedges— is the same one that was drawn twenty-one years ago.
There are two ways for a brand to reach twenty years. One is to remake itself every so often and ask the public to learn who you are all over again. The other is to get the system right early and never have to. Coque is the second case, and that is the real reason for this news: the house is launching a new identity and website without having changed its brand.
2005: a star in the kitchen and a brand that did not tell it
When Ideavia began working with the Sandovals, Coque had held its first Michelin star for a year —won in 2004— and was still in Humanes de Madrid, thirty kilometres from the centre, in the building where the family had been cooking for more than forty years. The kitchen was ahead of the brand: the restaurant was already something else and its image did not yet say so. The brief, as it arrived, was not to ask for a logo: it was to ask that people recognise what they were before the guest walked through the door.
Everything else follows from that difference. A logo runs out as soon as the premises, the format or the medium change. What was drawn in 2005 was something else.
«We did not design a logo. We designed a grammar».
The grammar: three pieces and a rule that changes
Coque's visual system has a short, deliberate inventory: circles, semicircles and wedges. The pieces are always the same. The only thing that changes from one application to another is the rule that orders them. The five letters of COQUE, the ones that open this page, are not five drawings: they are five different rules applied to the same set of pieces. The C is a disc cut in half; the O is the whole disc; the Q is the disc crossed by a wedge; the U is the semicircle resting on the baseline; the E is the disc with a quarter taken away.
It is a system that is cheap to maintain and hard to break. That is why the 2005 identity still worked in 2019, when the house moved, and still works today in a medium that did not exist then as it is understood now.
The narrative: three generations, one family
Beneath the graphic system lies a sentence that orders the decisions: three generations who started in a family eatery in Humanes and reached two stars without changing family. It is not a slogan, and it was not written in a brainstorming meeting: it was found by asking questions, and ever since it has worked as a criterion. When deciding whether something belongs in the brand or not, the question is whether that story supports it.
That explains things that might otherwise seem like whims: that the three brothers —Mario in the kitchen, Diego in the dining room and Rafael in the cellar— each have their own page and their own colour within the same system, instead of a single «team» block. The house is not signed by one chef: it is signed by three crafts at once, and the brand had to be able to say so.
2019: the test of the move
In 2019 Coque moved to central Madrid: 1,100 m² at Marqués del Riscal 11 and four spaces that guests move through one after another. The brand was not remade. It was applied. And that is where a system proves that it is one, because it had to solve four different functions with the same pieces:
- Cocktail bar. Where the journey begins, and the first brand piece the guest touches: its menu.
- Wine cellar. Signage and labelling for the selection. The most technical and least eye-catching application of the four.
- Kitchen. Guests step inside. Everything seen here is brand, including what the team is wearing.
- Dining room. Where the journey ends: menu, table linen, tableware and the printed piece guests take home.
The new website, with the same vocabulary
The website you are reading is the latest application of that system, and it follows the same principle: nothing that was not already in the grammar. The main menu is not a panel that slides out; it is the grey disc of the Q growing until it fills the screen. The spaces section does not crop the photo of the dining room into a rectangle: it crops it into the semicircle of the dome, which is the shape the building already had. The letters of the logotype fall and stack up with real weight and friction, because they are physical pieces before they are type. And the journey of the experience is drawn as a dotted path on a map, traced on the fly from the real position of each stop.
None of these gestures is an added ornament: they are all the same piece doing a new job. It is exactly what was decided in 2005.
Where things stand today
The system has survived a thirty-kilometre move, a change of category —two current Michelin stars and three Repsol Suns— and a sister brand derived from the same set of pieces, without ever being remade. Every successive version of the website has come from the original principle. In twenty-one years, Coque has not once had to introduce itself to its public again.
Frequently asked questions
- Who created Coque's new identity and website?
- Ideavia, a gastronomic branding studio based in Madrid, which has created Coque's visual identity, menus and digital communication since 2005.
- Since when have Coque and Ideavia worked together?
- Since 2005, without interruption: they began a year after Coque's first Michelin star, in 2004, when the restaurant was still in Humanes de Madrid, and they continue today, with two stars and 1,100 m² in the city centre.
- What is Coque's visual system?
- Three geometric pieces —circles, semicircles and wedges— and the rules that order them. The pieces do not change; the rule does. The five letters of COQUE are five applications of the same set.
- Has Coque's brand been redesigned for this website?
- No. The 2005 identity is still in use. The new website applies the existing system to a new medium, just as was done in 2019 with the move to Marqués del Riscal.
Sources
More about the team: Mario Sandoval, chef · Diego Sandoval, maître d' · Rafael Sandoval, sommelier · The experience, step by step
