In 2019, I had the opportunity to renovate the visual identity and print materials for Easton Bowl, a family-owned business for over 60 years in the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Designing for a bowling alley presented a few interesting challenges. Firstly, their graphic styles usually fall into two categories:

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1. vintage, outmoded, or amateurish

2. intentional retro with lots of atomic, mod, or other retro graphics

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Bowling, culturally, connotes a strong Americana aesthetic that can be difficult to not over-embellish. I reworked an identity with a hand-painted retro feel that avoids leaning too hard on any retro era or style. The identity feels modern while leveraging the nostalgic Americana of bowling and feeling like an alley from the 1950’s, 70’s, or any era in particular. Easton Bowl has a particularly rich and uncomplicated look, with old-school scoring computers, plastic orange seats, plush red booths, and stark black panels numbering the lanes.

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Building upon the ambience, as well as the existing logo and brand color—a brick red from the building’s original 50’s paint job—I expanded to softer tones including: red-orange (lane-side seats), teal (balancing red-orange), ochre (wooden lanes), charcoal (bowling ball), eggshell (balancing charcoal), lavender, and Key Lime green. I used these in vivid and fun print materials with color borders that echo the lane-side seats, and type similar to the type of hand-painted signage popular throughout the alley’s lifetime.

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To further add to the alley’s friendly face, I designed a pair of mascots for Easton Bowl, which not only added a cute, friendly character, but also winkingly reference another familiar face for the Eastern Shore, the National Bohemian “Natty Boh Guy” logo.