Background
I met Andreas Landén in 2020, in the middle of covid. Restaurang Jord had been open in central Linköping since 2018, cooking Swedish ingredients by season.
We agreed to test working together for a while. The test became a retainer with a fixed number of hours a month, and it is still running six years later.
Creative team
| Andreas Carlsson | Creative direction, video, photography, web |
| Andreas Landén | Founder |
| Oskar Gunnarsson | Head Chef |
| Katarina Hoverman | Sommelier |
| Emil Svedin | Art director, Jord logo |
The problem
Jord's story was never the food. It was everything behind the food: the people, the hunt, the fishing, the growing, the fermenting, the charcuterie. None of it was being told.
The reason isn't particular to Jord. Restaurants are, as a rule, technically uninterested. Setting up systems, scheduling social work, keeping a publishing routine, all of it sits at the bottom of a list that starts with service tonight. The graphic skill to design a site or a campaign is often not in the building either. Jord had the story and no time, no resources and no hands to tell it.
Concept
Behind the plate
Restaurant marketing defaults to the plate and the room it is served in: the dish, lit and centred, menu underneath. It has become the easiest thing to photograph and the least distinguishing thing you can show. Today every good kitchen has a good-looking plate.
So we decided to go the other way. The work Jord did before the plate was the part nobody else could copy, and it was already happening every week, that was the job to be done.
The "Behind the plate" concept then guided the rest of the visual language: don't let anything get in the way of what is behind the plate.
The brand
A carried logo, not replaced
Jord's identity was not mine to begin with. What I've done since is carry it.
The Jord logo was drawn by art director Emil Svedin at agency Markus, and it's a fantastic logo. Replacing it was never on the table. My job is to carry it into a Jord that keeps growing: a new site, newsletters, campaigns, five years of social, print, and two dining rooms that didn't exist when the logo was drawn. The foundation has stood untouched for almost ten years. Everything around it has moved.
There is no UI animations or motion in the new Jord design. The concept rules them out, nothing should get between a guest and the work behind the plate. The visual elements has to have a guiding functionality by helping a guest find a date, book it, and turn up.
The site
The site is the foundation of the communication, it is then complemented with newsletters and social media. The first impression on the site shall be what it would feel to visit Jord, the second impression is that you learn more about how Jord thinks and works. For that second layer we use sub-pages that also serves as SEO and agentic search and reccomendations.
The site is designed and built in WordPress, in Swedish and English. It also has a custom image gallery build for the staff so they easily can find and use images for communication and social media.
