Sound Room is a listening bar in Calgary built around a simple pleasure: a record spinning, a cold beer, and an excuse to sit and actually listen. Local studio Public Eye designed the identity to match, pulling from the golden age of hi-fi, when a stereo manual or a record sleeve did more to sell an experience than any modern ad ever could.
The project covers everything from the wordmark down to the matchbooks: menus, coasters, signage, a website, even the ashtrays on the bar. Every piece pulls from the same well of references, vintage record labels, stereo equipment manuals and the chunky, slightly worn typography that shows up on old audio gear, so the branding reads less like a logo package and more like something salvaged from a 1970s hi-fi shop.
A wordmark built like it came off vintage audio gear
The wordmark is the whole identity's anchor: thick, rounded letterforms stacked into two lines, closer to the badge on a vintage amplifier than a typical bar logo. It's confident enough to work at the scale of a sandwich board sign on the sidewalk and still hold up shrunk down to the size of a coaster.
Next to the wordmark sits a simpler mark: a row of vertical bars that reads as a waveform or an old speaker grille, depending on how you look at it. It shows up on its own wherever the full wordmark would be too much, on wayfinding, on the outside of the building, stamped quietly next to the street address.
The system carries into menus, coasters and drinks
Beer menus get the same numbered, catalogue-style treatment you'd find printed inside an old stereo manual, each line item stacked and numbered like a spec sheet rather than a chalkboard list. It's a small choice that keeps the tone consistent even in a piece of collateral that changes every week.
Coasters carry the waveform mark alone, stamped in a color that shifts depending on the run, while the wordmark shows up again on the printed drink list tucked under the glass. Everything on the table ends up doing double duty as a small piece of the brand system.
Signage that keeps the same voice as the menu
Even the practical signage, the posted hours, the door to the toilet, stays in character. A dark plate near the entrance lists the hours and house rules in the same condensed caps as the rest of the system, with icons for Sound Room and its sibling bars stamped along the top like a row of hi-fi component logos.
Outside, an A-frame sandwich board carries the wordmark at full size, oversized enough to read from across the street, with the website URL doing the job a phone number might have done on a sign fifty years ago.
Small, tactile pieces carry the identity home
The tactile stuff is where the identity earns its keep. Matchbooks and a glass ashtray, both stamped with the waveform mark, sit out on the bar for anyone who wants to take a piece of Sound Room home, or just fidget with while nursing a drink.
Business cards get tucked directly into the record crates behind the bar rather than left in a holder by the door, which says as much about the bar's priorities as anything else in the system: the records come first, and the branding fits itself around them.
The same card shows up again on the shelving behind the bar, propped between records and a stack of vintage hi-fi gear rather than filed away in a drawer.
What a hospitality brand can borrow from this
The lesson isn't the record-shop aesthetic itself, it's how tightly the reference holds across every material. A wordmark, one symbol, a tight palette and one typographic voice, repeated on a neon sign, a beer menu, a matchbook and a business card without ever feeling like four different projects. That consistency is what makes a small identity read as a finished world rather than a logo stuck onto a space. See more from the studio on its portfolio and Instagram.
