The Connection Between an Artichoke Sketch, Nostalgia, and Logo Design

A few months ago, I finished working on a logo for a high quality boutique catering company. One of the client's requests was to use an artistic element like an illustration or a sketch. Here is the story of how the logo was created. When I started working on the logo, I knew I wanted to use an illustration of a raw ingredient used in cooking, but also one that looks beautiful and adds value to the logo. After going through a long list of options, I landed on the artichoke.

"Not only the ritual around eating it makes the artichoke a good candidate for a catering logo, but mainly its appearance. The artichoke is an impressive flower, with layers upon layers of curving petals. It has refined aesthetics and beauty, lovely colors and textures."

Eating an artichoke has always been a festive activity in my eyes. You eat it differently from any other vegetable. You prepare a special sauce for it, eat only a small part of it, and there is a whole ritual around plucking the leaves one by one, dipping them in the sauce, and eating the edge of the leaf until you reach a prickly, fuzzy layer. That layer hides the tastiest part of the artichoke: its heart, meaty and juicy, perfect for wiping up the rest of the sauce.

Oh, the Attic, What a Brilliant Invention for Storage

When I realized I needed to sketch an artichoke, something wonderful happened. Twenty one years ago, I was a graphic design student at Vital, The Tel Aviv Center for Design Studies, known today as the Visual Communication Department at Shenkar. One of our courses back then was a sketching class. A project in that course was to sketch vegetables to accompany an imaginary cookbook. One of the sketches I drew was, you guessed it, an artichoke.

Frantically, not at all sure I would find them, I went up to the attic, that brilliant old fashioned invention for storing things not in daily use. I started digging through the dusty portfolios I have kept forever, searching for my vegetable sketches from decades ago. And I found them! The artichoke, the tomato, the lettuce, the pea pod, and the composition sketch of the purple cabbage, onion, pepper, and tomato.

And then that same wonderful thing happened to me. It is what always happens in those moments when I hold something I haven't seen in years. I stare into space and remember. I went back to one specific day, an afternoon when a classmate and I were sitting in her dining area, placing vegetables in front of us and sketching with colored pencils.

That afternoon, as I was sketching the vegetables, I felt something powerful. It is an experience that is very hard to describe, but anyone who creates has felt it more than once. The feeling of satisfaction. That feeling where, during the process, you discover as an outside observer how successful, enjoyable, and exciting your creation is. The adrenaline pushes you to continue and experience those feelings.

It is true that my drawing skills are what ultimately led me to choose design studies, but since my studies, they have hardly been part of my creative toolkit. Beyond the nostalgic aspect of my story, and the satisfaction that the artichoke sketch is still relevant today and fits a business logo perfectly, I came to a realization. I truly miss that feeling of discovery that accompanied me during the sketching process back then.