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PAUL:

Jackson, Mississippi claims many iconic dining institutions, the Mayflower, Crechale’s, Stamps, and so many more. Today, we'll hear about a collaborative project that's bringing a fresh look to some local restaurants.

Hey, it's Paul Wolf with a front row seat to conversations on culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call our podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places, and events that make the City With Soul shine. Today, we're speaking with Visit Jackson's own

Shonn Perryman, the Director of Brands and Creative Engagement, and Jackson State University interim art department chair Mark Geil about a design project involving JSU art students. It's a win-win for everyone involved, from the restaurants to the students and the community at large.

How did this restaurant rebranding project come about?

SHON:

At the time, I was adjunct professor at Jackson State - a professor of graphic design - and also the Creative Design Manager for Visit Jackson. So I was uniquely positioned to see how the needs of each organization could be fed with the partnership. And one of the primary goals of Visit Jackson, as you know, is to promote our restaurants. In teaching graphic design, I'm also teaching students how to create branding and logos and all the necessary things associated with a brand. And in promoting our restaurants, I see the need for updated branding to really give them the best look to put forward. When I'm giving my students their assignments, I like to create real world assignments so that they can then apply that to their resume, have real tangible things in their portfolio, real businesses that they can point to and see in the real world where they go to school. I decided to create a branding project where I was teaching them how to create logos and branding that was tied to some of our smaller mom and pop.

PAUL:

And that really makes a difference for those students too, doesn't it? To have their work be valued not just as an assignment, but at places where they might eat.

SHON:

It was great for me to see the change in their disposition, their way of looking at the work they were doing from the beginning of the semester to the end. Because if they are accustomed to doing vanity projects, so to speak, just for the sake of teaching them the skill, that's great for them to learn. But being able to touch and see how they're impacting somebody, and to see the actual results in real time really shifted their perspective of what they were doing.

PAUL:

Who are the restaurants that are benefiting from this rebranding project?

SHON:

So we worked with Bully’s, Sugars, and Taste of the Island. The best part about working with them is they were all very hands-on from start to finish. They came in and talked about their restaurants, the history behind it, the sort of feel and vibe they wanted to create in their space. And then once the projects were completed, they watched the students present everything and gave feedback and we fine tuned and they were able to choose the direction they wanted to go in.

PAUL:

Sometimes you just have to put an extra set of design professional eyes on it, don't you?

SHON:

A lot of our restaurants have been around for so long and they're truly staples in the community and their focus is primarily the food and continuing to feed people and update their menus and things of that nature. So a lot of the times once the business has been created, the brand, kind of falls by the wayside. Not to say that was the case here with all of them, but it's just not their top priority. And the restaurants that we've chosen, they get a lot of traffic. We get a lot of tourists that come in and specifically want to go to those places. So we just wanted to give them an upgrade.

PAUL:

And that's where Mark Giel from JSU comes in. And Mark, you saw this project from Shon and thought, “let's get the students involved.”

MARK:

Absolutely. And what was so special about the project was Shon was also a student of mine and she was actually one of my first students in 2011 when I first started at Jackson State. So it was amazing to see her first graduate from the program, go to graduate school, work as a graphic designer, come back with everything she's learned and come back with this amazing idea of a true partnership. And it is so true that for graphic designers, their portfolio is everything. It's their calling card. It's everything that gets in the door of a job. And so it is really important to have real world designs, designs that have lived in the world, have functioned in the world. And so it's so crucial for our students to have that experience. And beyond that, in the same feedback loop that Shon did of going through the program and coming back and teaching in it. Now our students can have that same feedback loop of creating this signage and these menus and this brand identity for these really beloved local traditions, these icons and really pillars of the community. Because when you go to these restaurants, the experience that so many people have is that it's coming home, it's coming to a family. You're a regular and they remember you and they say hello to you. So I was able to see two of the restaurant owners come in and kind of describe their story, describe their origin story. And it was amazing to see how the students responded to that, that they came up with these amazing designs that encapsulated all that history, all that local history of these really beloved restaurants.

PAUL:

I can imagine with you working with the students day in and day out: so what was their response to this project and...the ability to literally leave their mark on these Jackson institutions?

MARK:

They really engaged with it. One of the students whose signage had been selected, she got so excited and she was so excited to come to the unveiling and tell her dad and bring her dad with her. So it really left this indelible mark on these students. And we'll be able to tell students for multiple years in the future that, yeah, a graphic design student from Jackson State designed that sign that you're looking at and it just makes it more meaningful for them.

SHON:

Mark, is this a project that has a future with your students?

MARK:

The students here are really hungry for that. They're hungry for, for having that real world experience for making an impact on their community. And so yeah, we welcome any kind of collaboration like that.

PAUL:

Shon, this ties in perfectly with our Jackson Restaurant Week. That's February 23 through March 1 and culminates with Jackson Food & Wine on March 2, a great tie-in when people already have their eyes on Jackson restaurants.

SHON:

That's the whole point of the week, to really show love to all of our restaurants and just the restaurant community as a whole. But in doing so, it's not just to get people in the building to purchase food. We also want to highlight the partners like Jackson State that are doing things behind the scenes that people don't know about so that there's more resources to make more things like this happen and more encouragement for other people to make things like this happen. If there are local businesses that are in need of that sort of thing, I say partner with our universities and really assist the students and assist yourselves. Jackson is a college town and if you are struggling in that area, that's really a way to, like you said earlier, benefit all the parties involved.

PAUL:

We have a Jackson restaurateur by the name of Jeff Good that says, “Working together works.” And Mark, what a great example of a partnership that, when you work together, it really benefits everybody involved.

MARK:

Yeah, it was really electric to see those restaurant owners come into class. And Sugar’s had catered the Jackson State football team for an entire summer. Every morning, they provided breakfast for them. So again, it was this this other connection to Jackson State. It was so amazing to witness.

PAUL:

My thanks to Shon and Mark for taking time to talk about the behind the scenes of the rebranding of Sugar's Place, Taste of the Island, and Bully’s. You'll see those new brands in action after they're officially unveiled on March 1. It's all part of Jackson Restaurant Week, and I'll put a link in our show notes to learn more.

Soul Sessions is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Mississippi's capital city. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Ricky Thigpen, and I'm our managing editor. You want to know more about the great work we do to help make Jackson a better place? You can find all of that at visitjackson.com.

I'm Paul Wolf, and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

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