2023

Dave & Buster's

Senior Designer, Mother Design

How might we make a legacy brand feel as relevant to new audiences as it does to loyal ones?

Decades into its run as the originator of "eatertainment", Dave & Buster's brand still skewed toward families, even as its fastest-growing audience was adults craving an escape from routine. New brand guidelines reimagined the identity as energetic and permissive as the experience itself.

Head of Design: Mark Sloan  |  Art Director: Eli Park 

The Brief

Dave & Buster's identity had grown dark, neon, and arcade-skewing, with guidelines loose enough to lose consistency across applications. As Mother's communications team built a new campaign around 'you know you want to,' pulling the brand's focus beyond arcade-for-kids into eat and watch, the design team's task was to translate that strategy into a warmer, more cohesive system, streamlined to reduce excess choice without losing flexibility.

The Solution

The result reconciles D&B's neon-lit energy with a warmer, more inviting register. Typography, color, photography, and the brand's signature ampersand motif all shifted together, creating an identity flexible enough to work across signage, app, menu, and campaign executions while still feeling unmistakably D&B.

The Wordmark

Built on an invisible spherical frame, the dimensional logo is designed to scale up and crop into bold, immersive moments. 

The full logo set includes a primary version alongside secondary logos designed to bookend vertical layouts.

Color Palette

The palette shifted from a darker, neon arcade aesthetic to something brighter and warmer.

Primary palette

Secondary palette, brought to life through a gradient-driven system.

Multi-color gradients

Two-color gradients

Typography

DIN Buster Demi Bold, finessed through collaboration with a type designer, anchors large-scale headlines, paired with Alaska Extra Condensed for legibility and a wider range of tone.

Alaska performs well at a variety of scales, and slight styling changes can evoke a diverse range of tones.

Ampersand

The ampersand became a sculptural graphic moment, built to hold the brand's range and sense of community.

Art Direction

New art direction, developed in partnership with the comms team, traded the previous dark, neon arcade look for something warmer and more inviting, pulling focus beyond arcade alone into the brand's food and entertainment divisions.

The SYSTEM

The brand system is built for range: loud enough for a 40-foot sign, considered enough for an app screen, yet consistent enough to feel undeniably D&B.

Iconography is round, approachable, and constructed for digital screens.

Render of future D&B exterior

In-store menu kiosk design