buenos tacos

A taco window in a Lutsk shopping centre: takeaway and delivery only, no tables. Started by a Ukrainian veteran.

One hard condition: no sugar skulls. Mexican food abroad is sold with the same three pictures — Day of the Dead face paint, sombreros, a cactus. That imagery belongs to a two-day festival, and borrowing it to sell lunch says nothing true about Mexico or this business. So Dima started with research.

Dima read Mexican street culture the way an advertiser does: not what the world paints about Mexico, but what Mexican businesses put on their own walls, plates and signs. Four threads came back.

• Muralism. Public, full height, colour. The argument for eight colours, not the safe three.
• Practical folklore. Pottery and woven ornament as a pattern library: geometry to redraw and get inspired.
• Rótulos. Hand-painted signs, letters drawn by a signwriter, never set from a font. Hence the wordmark is an illustration.
• Otomí embroidery. Flowers, birds and animals on a pale ground, strikingly close to Ukrainian vyshyvanka. Two cultures that never met decorate cloth the same way. For a Mexican place in Lutsk, that is the bridge the whole identity stands on.

A taco held in a hand, drawn by hand. The wordmark is lettering, not type, so it is always used from the original files. Dima's guide sets clear space, a round version for stickers and signs, and which version goes on which ground.

Foo for headings, Coolvetica for text, both with Cyrillic. Plus a drawn set of chillies, limes, corn, avocado and salsa dishes, and two patterns built from it. One navigates the menu: an ingredient marks a section, so you find the vegetarian taco by looking, not reading.

The box is the whole shopfront of a delivery order, the only piece of the brand in the room when it lands on a desk.

Every dish is named in Spanish, with a Ukrainian line and gram weight beneath. Nobody has to guess what a burrito con camarón tigre is, and nobody is talked down to.

No interior to design: the public only sees the counter, fascia and window. So the counter became the pattern, bands of ingredients and rótulo lettering stacked like an embroidered border, with woven otomí-style panels at both ends.

an identity stops being a file the day other people start photographing it. these are the venue's own stories from the opening week and a repost from a visitor — the boxes in a customer's hands, the counter with a queue at it, and somebody telling their followers that a mexican place has opened.