Work / F&B
Dhanashree Catering Service
Coimbatore's most trusted name in catering
- Client
- Dhanashree Catering Service
- Year
- 2024
- Industry
- F&B
A family caterer in Coimbatore whose logo hides its own initials inside a Kolam — the rice-flour pattern drawn fresh on every Tamil doorstep at dawn.
01The Brief
A caterer that had outgrown word-of-mouth, and needed a mark as considered as the food.
K. Narayanan's Dhanashree Catering Service had built its name the old way — one wedding, one birthday, one corporate lunch at a time, across Coimbatore. What it didn't have was an identity that matched the care going into the food itself: something rooted, something Tamil, something that read as home cooking rather than banquet-hall catering.
Roasted, not rushed
Idli, vada, sambar — on a banana leaf, the way it's meant to be eaten
02The Kolam
Every Tamil morning starts with one drawn at the threshold.
Long before signage or logos, Tamil households have marked their doorstep each dawn with a Kolam — a geometric pattern laid freehand in rice flour, gone by evening, redrawn the next day. It isn't decoration; it's a ritual of care, repeated daily without an audience. Which is exactly what catering is, done well.
We traced a single continuous kolam line into the shape of a D and a C, nested into each other — the initials only visible once you're told to look for them.
D, C, and a kolam line — drawn as one stroke
Catering logos in Coimbatore mostly reach for the same three things.
Problem
A chef's hat, a covered platter, a swirl of steam. None of them are wrong, exactly — they're just the shorthand any caterer could use, which means none of them do the one job a logo has to do: be unmistakably one business.
Hide the brand's own initials inside a ritual only its own culture would recognise.
Solution
The semi-circle at the base of the kolam-D became the seed for a whole icon set — serving dish, beverage glass, a heart built from two nested commas, a vegan leaf, a chef's toque, twelve marks sharing one geometry.
The DCS icon set — every mark grown from the same half-circle
03Colour
Nostalgic. Rooted. Earthy.
The palette was pulled straight from the kitchen: a wood-fired kadai, a clay pot of pongal, a torn banana leaf, and the red of chilli and turmeric drying in the sun. Nothing brand-safe about it — it's the actual colour of the food.
Palette
Char
Wood-fired base
Rust
Primary mark
Peach
Warm neutral
Deep Palm
Banana leaf
Ember
Chilli
Turmeric
Marigold accent
Rust on the plate, before it's on the wall
04Out in the World
A logo has to survive a kitchen, not just a screen.
Uniforms in two colourways, hand-hemmed napkins, business cards, a hanging shop sign, a highway billboard, gold-rimmed service plates — every touchpoint a Coimbatore catering business actually needs, none of it precious.
Kitchen cream
Service red
Table linen, monogrammed
K. Narayanan, Proprietor
Shop signage
Front-of-house apron
Weddings, birthdays, corporate — one billboard, three services
Table linen and seating
Gold-rimmed service ware
To become Coimbatore's most trusted name in catering, synonymous with quality and excellence.
The Result
A Kolam hiding a monogram
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