Service design Brand identity Operations

Blackbox
Sandwiches

A sandwich shop in Morganton, North Carolina. I designed the brand, the menu, the space, and the operational systems.

Claire's hand-drawn layout of the shop: triple sink and dry rack along the back wall, storage and a bathroom to the left, a long prep table, a reach-in freezer and dry store to the right, and a cooler and make unit running through the middle. Below them, in her handwriting, 'reduce height ≈16 inch counter' with an arrow, and 'proposed new counter'. Counters with stools run along the front and the right-hand wall, with a booth in the corner.
Initial layout sketch

Then I stepped out of it. Eight months on, the systems are still succeeding without me.

Role
Brand, menu, space, kitchen systems, web
Timeline
Designed 2025–2026 handed over Feb 2026
Constraint
Lean startup budget, break even inside a year
Status
Open since Nov 2025 5.0 on Google

Every decision had to work for

  1. 01a customerdecide fast, and trust the place
  2. 02a cookno guessing, no judgment calls
  3. 03the foodconsistent, and it holds up
  4. 04the clocka lunch rush is ninety minutes long
  5. 05the brandrecognizable at an inch and a half and at three feet

at the same time.

The easy small-town spot goes warm and cozy. I went the opposite direction.

Branding

One mark, one wordmark, four colors, everywhere a customer looks.

The wordmark

Blackbox Sandwiches is always the wordmark. It is never set in a typeface. One line where there is room, stacked where there is not.

The wordmark on one line: BLACKBOX SANDWICHES in wide, heavy hand-drawn capitals.
One line
The wordmark stacked: BLACKBOX above SANDWICHES, in the same capitals.
Stacked

Color

Charcoal and cream hold the brand. Orange gives highlight and hierarchy. Blue is the pop.

  1. ground#FBE9CE
  2. ink#181313
  3. highlight#D46917
  4. pop#0A63C8

Type

Bitter for headings

Karla, for everything else

The menu

The menu the shop opened with: a yellow card with a cartoon character, pastel speech bubbles, a hand-drawn salad shape and sandwich names in an outlined display face, prices set away from the names.
The menu we opened with

The first menu was designed to look cute and list the sandwiches. It had no design system. The second one is built on one.

The front of the menu, cream type on black: nine hot sandwiches in three columns, each with a name, price, description in gray, and the bread in italic underneath. Chili and leaf markers flag spicy, vegetarian and vegan. A rule at the foot reads 'all sandwiches come with chips – upgrade to house salad for $2'.The back of the menu: cold sandwiches, a kids column and a sides column, with opening hours and the catering line at the foot.
The menu that replaced it

Structure

Grouped, ordered, and split by side. Hot on the front, cold on the back. Every group has a clear edge, so you find your part of the menu before you read a word of it.

Hierarchy

Every row is the same object. Name, price, what is in it, the bread. More contrast, and clear labels for spicy, vegetarian and vegan, so the card is scanned, not read.

Simplicity

The menu looks like the shop. The brand colors and fonts, on the card a customer holds while deciding.

Brand continuity

Dropped the charm for continuity. The garlic icon, stars, and other page details were removed to give more negative space and allow the sandwich names to be the focal points.

The website

I made the first site on Squarespace. Then I rebuilt it for the shop, not from a template.

The old Squarespace home page on black: the gator logo over Blackbox Sandwiches, Morganton NC and 5.0 on Google, three orange buttons (view menu, catering, order online), a sandwich and a plate of kiwi and macarons on checkered paper either side, and 'our picks' in orange below.
The old site
The new Blackbox home page: the gator logo centered on charcoal, two buttons, one cream line reading 'Quality ingredients. Bold flavors. Almost nothing out of a package.', and a checkered strip along the foot.
The new site

The job

Most people who find Blackbox are from out of town. They see 5.0 on Google and decide whether to come.

The site’s job is to make the shop look legitimate and convey what to expect when visiting.

How I got to this design

The first design: BLACKBOX SANDWICHES set huge in a condensed black face on a pale ground, a small line of copy under it, and a cropped photograph of a sandwich along the bottom.
Claude’s first design

The first design, built with Claude. It was font heavy, the photo crops looked odd, and the branding fell flat. In a weird way it was doing too much, but not what was important.

I hoped Claude would throw me options that might change my perspective. It pushed me into Figma instead, where I could make it simple, branded and clear: the logo, and one sentence standing out on a simple page.

The top half of the home page Claire drew in Figma: the gator logo on charcoal with two buttons and one line, 'Quality ingredients. Bold flavors. Almost nothing out of a package.', then the top three sandwiches with photographs and ingredients, a cream band reading 'We're a father and daughter shop, run by Morganton natives.', and a close photograph of the shawarma.The bottom half of the same home page: the salted chocolate chip cookie on cream, 'Yes, we cater!' on charcoal with delivery, boxed lunches and platters, a 'Come see us' band with the address, hours and phone beside a drawn map of Morganton, and the footer with the wordmark.
The home page I made in Figma
The type playground: the About page heading and the home page's one line set in candidate faces, with a panel down the right for choosing the display and body face and sliding weight, size, tracking and leading.
Type exploration on a playground

Our picks, now the top three

The old 'our picks' row on white: three sandwich names in orange capitals, each under a mood label in italics (staff favorite, most ordered, signature) with a one-line description.
Old

The labels were fluff. People do not want the vibe of a sandwich. They want to see it and know what is in it.

The new top three on charcoal: The Pinnacle, Midnight Stack and Westside Club, each with a photograph on checkered paper and its full ingredients underneath.
New

The menu, as text

The old site’s menu was two pictures of the print menu. Google could not read a single sandwich name, and neither could a screen reader. Now it is real text, in the print menu’s own structure.

The new web menu as real text on cream: 'hot sandwiches' over three columns of names and prices, each with its ingredients and bread underneath, and small markers for spicy, vegetarian and vegan.

Catering

The old catering inquiry form on orange: about fifteen fields, from name and company through event date, guest count, catering style checkboxes, pickup or delivery, and a full address.
Before

The old form was cumbersome, and it asked for details we confirm on the phone anyway. The goal is a phone call, so now it only asks for six things.

The new catering form on cream, headed 'Get it booked': your name, phone or email, date, how many people, pickup or delivery, and an optional 'anything else', with one orange Send it button and the shop's phone and email above and below.
After
Visit the site
Explore the restaurant and systems designThe choices that helped lead to breaking even in 7 months, a 100 health score, and 5.0 on Google.

The room

Three painted ceiling tiles decided the room.

The question the whole build ran on was how to make brand, fun and design ourselves, with very little money.

Three ceiling tiles painted as samples and laid on the existing speckled floor under the front window: a burnt orange, a mid blue and a warmer orange, against the black-painted base of the block wall.
Two oranges and a blue, painted onto the actual ceiling tile and laid on the floor to be judged in the room’s own light. The ceiling took the burnt orange.
The room mid-build with the suspended ceiling painted deep orange, walls still bare block, and an orange door at the far end.
The ceiling went first
A close view of four surfaces meeting: a blue-painted block wall, a black reveal, a white-painted block pier, and a flat orange wall, in four vertical bands.
Blue, black, white, orange, at four edges
Orange molded stools along a plywood counter at the window, with four framed prints above and a small table carrying a goose illustration set under its surface.
And on the objects people touch

Against the initial drawing

Survived

  1. The wall, down to counter height

    Reduced by about sixteen inches. Kitchen behind, dining in front, no hatch and no door.

  2. The zones, and what belongs in each

    Every zone sat where this drawing put it, holding what this drawing gave it.

Did not

  1. How the equipment sat inside them

    The arrangement within each zone moved once the room was real.

  2. Counter stools and booths

    The wait and the seats were the same strip of floor, and booths were poor at the budget. Every table but one was built instead.

What it cost

Seats.

Blackbox has 13, floor space is the hardest limit on the business, and cutting the stools and the booths bought standing room with covers it can never sell.

The line

Two people, one direction, and a cooler split down the middle by the press.

A measured plan of the shop with both routes drawn on it. The kitchen runs along the top: mop and storage, dish along the back wall, a make unit, a prep table in the middle of the floor, coolers and ovens to the right, and beverage equipment at the far end. A counter runs almost the full width, with the register at its right-hand end. The front of house below it holds tables, stools and the entrance. A dashed teal route, the sandwich build, runs from the make unit down past the presses and the finishing bench and across the counter at the register. A solid red route, the guest journey, comes in through the door, up to the counter, along to the register, and back into the room to a table. Both are numbered 01 to 04.
  1. 01builtmake unit, far side
  2. 02pressedround the corner of the L
  3. 03finishedcold, in the near side of the same unit
  4. 04wrapped + boxedand run out, by the finisher

One cooler serves both sides of the press: pressable ingredients in the far half, cold in the near half. So a sandwich comes out of the press and is finished without traveling.

Two people work it, a builder and a finisher, and they never swap position. They hand over.

A laminated build sheet in a punched sleeve on a white wall. Each sandwich is a boxed block: a name and bread across the top, then two columns divided by a vertical rule standing for the press. The right column holds what gets pressed: chicken, cheddar, onions, paneer, peppers, turkey and pastrami, provolone, beef, shrooms. The left column holds what finishes it afterwards: pickle, arugula, garlic aioli, iceberg, herb sauce.
One block per sandwich, split by the press

The rule down the middle is the press.

Through it on the right, added after on the left. It reads right to left, the way the line runs.

The kitchen seen from the register position, under the orange ceiling. A cook in red works the presses in the corner; behind him the builder in gray stands at the make unit; another person works at the back bench, and a fourth runs a stand mixer at the prep counter.
The working line

The recipe

Organized systems mean a clean, tight line and safe food handling.

100100100

Health inspection score. Three times.

Recipes standardized, mains pre-portioned, and batch sizes scaled to the containers they get stored in rather than to the number of sandwiches. Prep, storage and rotation stop being three systems that have to agree and become one.

Judgment is expensive at lunchtime and cheap at nine in the morning.

One cook building one sandwich, and the whole system is in it:

  • two sanitation buckets, one holding the sandwich knife between cuts
  • nitrile gloves worn, and the box of them within reach
  • sandwich wrap, stacked at the station
  • use-first sticker rolls on the shelf, where they are used
  • a use-first sticker already on a squeeze bottle, dated in marker

Nothing here is arranged for a camera, which is the only version an inspector ever sees.

The same photograph of the line, read for its detail: two red sanitation buckets, one with a knife handle standing in it; a box of nitrile gloves on the shelf beside a receipt printer; two rolls of red USE FIRST stickers; a stack of sandwich wrap; and squeeze bottles labeled and dated in marker, one carrying a USE FIRST sticker, above pans of shredded lettuce, sliced tomato and house pickle.
The same frame, read for what is in it

The box that travels

Making ten sandwiches is not the same problem as making a hundred.

layeredsix movements per sandwich
choppedone

Across a hundred sandwiches that is six hundred movements against a hundred, and the sandwich still holds after an hour in a box.

The catering card: a black header with the wordmark and the alligator, a cream band carrying boxed lunches at fifteen dollars a head and platters at fourteen, upgrades, and a boxed office sampler at $275 feeding up to twenty with no substitutions, then six sandwiches on black below, two of them described as chopped and tossed in a sauce.
The catering card

What it cost

Edits, on one box.

The office sampler takes no substitutions and no requests: the shop chooses what goes in it. That is why it gets pushed, best value for the customer and fastest for the kitchen. Boxed lunches and platters can still be worked around.

It has not needed me since February.

What held

The menu structure
The order, the categories, the way it is read. Unchanged.
The kitchen zoning
Hot before the press, cold after, packing last. Unchanged.
The daily operation
Run by people who did not design it, with me a state away.
The seats still open
The room trades covers for flow on every service, and eight months of other people running it has not settled the argument.
Two people standing in front of the yellow alligator panel in the dining room, arms folded, holding up a health inspection certificate scored 100.
The score, and the two people it belongs to

What design can and cannot claim

100health score three inspections

Strong contribution. Rotation, labeling, clean-down, recipe systems, and station design were built around safe, repeatable handling. The inspections were scored by people with no reason to flatter us.

5.0Google rating

Contributed. I designed and distributed 300 review cards during opening, and the brand, packaging, and customer experience helped shape what people reviewed. The rating itself belongs to the food, service, and team too.

7months to break even

Partial contribution. Speed of service, catering workflows, packaging decisions, and building rather than fully fitting out helped. So did rent, food cost, my dad, and the realities of the town.

Built across

Identity
Sketched by hand, drawn in Illustrator
Print + fabrication
Menus, catering card, stickers, review card, door lettering, and custom stencil
Web
Squarespace first, then rebuilt: drawn in Figma, built with Claude Code
Built by hand
Wall table, live-edge table, stencil and spray work, paint
Systems
Component recipes, batch scaling, cooler rotation, line layout, staff handoffs