An Extra Helping of Maudie's

Pentagram's DJ Stout and his team at the Austin office rebranded Maudie's Tex-Mex three years ago and have continued working with the iconic local restaurant chain ever since. Maudie's, which began as a tiny Mexican food cafe in a strip-mall shopping center not far from the Austin office, has now expanded to six locations. Tex-Mex is an original Texas invention, a close cousin to the traditional cuisine of the Lone Star State's neighbor to the south, but a truly unique culinary art all its own. Maudie's has continued the Tex-Mex tradition but with a very "Austin" twist: It is the only all-natural Tex-Mex restaurant in the region. Unlike its Mexican brethren, Maudie's uses all-natural beef and chicken and organic eggs. Maudie's has mastered the art of Tex-Mex, and Pentagram has mastered the art of Maudie's.

Stout, who has frequented the original Maudie's location since the late 1980s, was originally contacted by owner Joe Draker in 2010 to rebrand his newest restaurant location, at the time called Maudie's Hill Country. Draker was so pleased with the new look he asked Pentagram to roll it out to his other locations. Since then Stout and lead designer Barrett Fry have designed a variety of menus, t-shirts, placemats, ice cream packaging, posters, banners, murals, exterior signage, catering truck graphics, and even an oversized novelty check for a charity. "Barrett got really excited about the novelty check," says Stout. "And what designer wouldn't."

The Maudie's look was inspired by the unintentional bad printing and random non-design of the posters and menus found on the streets of border towns like Juarez and Nuevo Laredo. "There's a kind of unstudied folk art quality to the print material down there," says Stout. "We tried to capture the spirit and naivety of the Texas-Mexico border. The birthplace of Tex-Mex."