Brand and Packaging Designer
© 2025 Carlita Bryant
Saludos Donut Bar
Drawing on personal experience with working jobs during nontraditional business hours, I developed a community-oriented donut shop dedicated to bridging the gap between health, convenience, and flavor. Through in-depth research on strategy development and the embracement of new AI tools, I took advantage of a niche market opportunity that welcomes the hungry hustlers and created a brand that feels like home, no matter the time of day.
ArtCenter Student Gallery
start-up strategy and packaging design
The U.S. alone includes 25 million people who work shifts at nontraditional hours, not including the number of students who are also up at these times. Many of whom struggle to find healthier options, putting them at higher risk for chronic illnesses. And, while this is true, donuts are still one of the top breakfast bakery items sold on menus.
Saludos Donut Bar is serving Los Angeles County’s underserved late-night donut market (~$21.6M–$151.2M), driven by increasing demand from shift workers, students, and night owls seeking healthier, more convenient options.
A welcoming environment was an essential piece of what makes Saludos the brand that it is. Leaning on market research to help me understand what that means for a food brand, especially at night, I found that nostalgia brings the comfort needed to make customers feel at home. I used a mix of skills, both in Photoshop and AI prompting, to develop imagery that would create this warmth.
The packaging offers a durable, earth-friendly, and reliable way to commute with donuts. And, while a physical donut shop was important to the brand, solving the problem of convenience and accessibility meant adapting the donut shop business model to today’s technological advancements.
The generation of these images was a multi-step process involving my own hand sketches used as visual and compositional reference, and uploaded to a variety of AI tools. Once the desired look was achieved, I further edited the images in Photoshop to brand them and align with the Saludos identity.
The development of this start-up had a clear goal: to make people’s lives easier.
With the implementation of strategic ways to make healthier food options more accessible, Saludos Donut Bar is equipped with the right tools to grow into its potential as a real-life brand. This project taught me about how to embrace new technologies in ways that align with my own approach to graphic design.