Blossom Bee Creperie

Branding, Design and Development for a Thai Creperie & Fusion Restaurant || Feb 2021 - Mar 2021

The Team

Myself (individual project)

My Roles

Branding, Logo Design, Graphic Design, Photography, UX Design, Website Development

Tools

G-Suite, Procreate, Adobe CC (Illustrator, Photoshop), Wix

The Challenge

As a local neighborhood hole-in-the-wall, their customer base consisted of mainly regulars and families in the area. Due to the situation caused by the COVID lockdowns, they needed a way to reach a larger audience and drive more traffic to their restaurant and online ordering. In order to appeal to a new, younger customer base, Blossom Bee reached out for help in rebranding their business and modernizing their website. They had a time & budget constraint that unfortunately led me to skipping some steps in the design process, leading to the below.

The Design Process

Discovery

Stakeholder Interview

Competitive Analysis

Like all designs, I first assessed their current website and then started with a competitive analysis of other restaurant websites to see what kind of information was important to have. I noticed from the get-go that due to the lockdown situation, the first thing I saw on any site was some form of “TAKEOUT AVAILABLE” notice so that customers would know that the restaurant was still open and taking orders. Naturally, along with business hours and location, this became the most important information besides the photos of the food.

While their current website had a good number of photos, they were slightly blurry and the home page didn’t contain any useful information. Across the website, the overall style was inconsistent, and they didn’t have their actual logo displayed anywhere.

Design & Development

Logo Design

For the owners of Blossom Bee, a huge point of importance was creating a new logo. A huge part of their brand identity was in their logo, particularly because it was plastered on their signs, menus and even aprons. In order to stick with their “bee'“ theme and not diverge too much from their original style, they wanted to keep black and yellow as the main colors of their new brand.

In designing the new logo, I kept the same colors and instead focused on the line work. For it to appear modern, the lines needed to be clean and able to flow well. I was able to use the flourish of the bee’s wing as the “B” in “Blossom Bee”, pairing it with a script font for consistency. for “Creperies Fusion”, I chose a very modern sans-serif front to contrast nicely with the script.

Overall Branding

Another huge step towards modernization of a brand is clear graphics and photos. All instances we could find of the previous logo were very pixelated, meaning that it reflected the same way on all their printed materials. So alongside having a logo that was clean and high quality, the photos on their new website would have to be as well. I spent a day visiting the restaurant, where I took photos of a variety of dishes so we would have a large stock to choose from when it came time for final updates on the website.

Designing the Website

Information Architecture & Wireframes

Using the data I gathered from the competitive analysis, I put together a rough site map for the information architecture of the site. It was important that before I begin implementation (as there was no time or budget for me to make proper mockups or prototypes before developing the site) that the design covered everything that was necessary. 

Once that was confirmed with the owner, I went ahead and did some quick wireframes for basic layout, shown below.

Below I will outline some of the major design decisions made throughout the process.

The Home Page

They say you eat with your eyes first, so I was drawn to the idea of having one of their popular crepes front and center when you arrived at their website. That, along with the takeout notice, business hours, and address were all that I wanted customers to see when they first landed on the home page (along with the nav bar’s call-to-action for online ordering). Scrolling down, there would be a little blurb about the restaurant that captured what kind of food they sold and any values they wished to highlight, and then below that a gallery filled with colorful photos of their other dishes meant to make your mouth water.

Nav Bar & Footer

After comparing the layouts of several different restaurant websites from high-end to even tea shops, I settled on four pages for the entirety of the website: home, about, menu and contact.

Being on every page, the nav bar and footer are very important locations to display information, especially information that needs to be seen repeatedly. For this reason, I wanted to place a call to action both at the top and bottom of the pages, making it easy for customers to click right into Blossom Bee’s DoorDash link. All pages can be accessed from the nav bar or footer, meaning if a customer has scrolled to the bottom of the menu, they don’t have to scroll all the way back up to get to another page. Additionally, contact information, location, and business hours are repeated in the footer since those are our key points to highlight.

Aesthetic & Consistency

To improve flow and general consistency when navigating the website, it was important that only a few colors and fonts were used throughout the website. I wanted every page to have a similar feeling, so no matter where the customer had navigated to, it would still feel like "“Blossom Bee”. The style the owners were looking for was modernized but still inviting; after all, they were a family-run restaurant with a cozy atmosphere.

To modernize the website, the new high-quality images were swapped in and sans-serif fonts were used. I kept the yellow and black theme across the site, using a script front for large headers to reflect the script in the logo, and then bold sans-serif fonts for sub-headers to differentiate from paragraph text and easy readability. To add some character, I made a custom lace trimming for the page headers to reflect the place mats used in the actual restaurant.

The previous website was hosted on Wix, and the owner wished to keep that platform since they were familiar enough with it to be able to update it as they needed. They were very responsive when it came to content curation, so we were able to complete the website in a very timely manner.