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From a pretend bar in his bedroom, Sean Wilkinson now designs the look of restaurants.

Bedroom bar to designing the look of restaurant logos.

As a teenager in Bangor, Sean Wilkinson had an active imagination that led him to create something not found in most adolescents’ bedrooms: a mock bar. “I think I watched too much ‘Cheers,’” he told me. “And for some reason my parents didn’t get too worried.”

Wilkinson worked with what he had, which wasn’t much. “I turned my bureau around and my brother and I would hang out there. I had a Lowenbrau neon sign in the corner. We’d dim the lights and listen to Led Zeppelin and make some Kool-Aid mixed beverages.”

Clearly this was a young man destined to work in the bar or restaurant business. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. Instead he now runs a design and branding business, Might & Main in Portland, and helps create the look of restaurants—tables, logos, signs, menus, paintings, the works. The first job he took on, Eventide, became one of the buzziest restaurants in Maine, a place where in the summer customers are lined up out the door fifteen minutes before opening. Since then the jobs have kept coming, and Wilkinson has now helped design exactly forty restaurants.

Well-executed design, Wilkinson believes, should give people walking by a restaurant a sense of what the place is and then draw them in. In the end, though, customers shouldn’t necessarily stop to think about the look of a restaurant; they should simply enjoy it. He’s a believer in one of the maxims in his field: “Good design is invisible.”

www.might-main.com

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