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Gaijin -
For Gaijin, we wanted to do something that was different from the ordinary hand-painted signage you find in most Japanese restaurants, which are clichéd approximations and appropriations of Japanese signage.
I did a deep dive, studying restaurants and izakayas outside of Japan
I wanted to do something that was a bit more tongue-in-cheek but also a bit more meaningful and localized, and so when discussing this with Zen, we decided to come up with things that would be Urdu sayings but written in Japanese. So I basically shortlisted 12-15 different sayings, then we reviewed them, I transliterated them, I translated them, and then I learned exactly how to write them in kanji and hand-painted them maybe 4-5 times for each sign and picked the one that looked best.
For Gaijin, we wanted to do something that was different from the ordinary hand-painted signage you find in most Japanese restaurants, which are clichéd approximations and appropriations of Japanese signage that you'd find in a restaurant. I wanted to do something that was a bit more tongue-in-cheek but also a bit more meaningful and localized, and so when discussing this with Zen, we decided to come up with things that would be Urdu sayings but written in Japanese. So I basically shortlisted 12-15 different sayings, then we reviewed them, I transliterated them, I translated them, and then I learned exactly how to write them in kanji and hand-painted them maybe 4-5 times for each sign and picked the one that looked best.
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