The Broadway Bar
Brand Identity | Logo Design | Illustration | Merchandise
A brand identity rooted in what was already there. Not what could have been invented.
The Broadway Bar has anchored S. Broadway Ave in Boise, Idaho since the 1950’s. It’s a cheap, no-nonsense neighborhood institution. It’s one of the last genuine dive bars in a city that’s been changing around it.
The opportunity wasn’t to modernize it. The opportunity was to finally see it clearly.
Low prices aren’t a liability here. They’re the whole point. The brand platform treats affordability as a badge of honor and a community value, not an apology.
Discovery Over Invention
Working as a design historian rather than a brand consultant, The Trust Dept developed a full identity system built directly from the bar’s iconic mid-century modern signage. The typographic lockups, mark variations, and application system were drawn from the original sign’s letterforms — refined, organized, and made reproducible without losing the rough warmth of the era they came from.
Logotype
Cheap and Proud
The Broadway Bar is a cash-only, cheap-beer, no-nonsense neighborhood institution. It’s been owned by real people with real histories, including one bartender who acquired the place under circumstances you genuinely couldn’t make up, and it has served generations of blue-collar Boiseans who don’t need their bar to have a brand strategy.
Which is exactly why this project mattered. The branding had to earn its place in that room. It couldn’t arrive with attitude it hadn’t paid for. The identity needed to feel like it had always been there. Because in spirit, it had.
The result is a mark that every Boisean should recognize: not because it’s new, but because it feels like theirs. That’s the job. Cheap and proud.
