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This British Columbia based restaurant specializing in Chinese cuisine contracted my firm to design a site for their business. They provided us with a number of images of the food they served as well as photos of the newly finished interior of their restaurant but were unfortunately unable to provide us with text content for the initial build. With this in mind I set out to make a site that spoke to the high quality of their food and service and would communicate this through images rather than text.
The images the client provided of their business’ interior would prove to be one of the biggest inspirations for the look and feel of their site. Using a similar colour scheme to that found in the restaurant I would also take the textures and patterns on the walls, floor and even upholstery and try to utilize similar visual themes throughout the site.
A design motif that I developed in the early stages of this site’s design was the visual of circular images with a semi-transparent black overlay covering the left side. This would end up becoming one of the major unifying themes throughout the site and something that i feel holds the design of the site as a whole together. In order to add some extra interactivity to the site these designs were achieved almost entirely through CSS rather than being created separately in Photoshop or a similar image editor.
For the homepage I would utilize a design principle used in some of my previous designs: A homepage broken into several sections that would fill the entirety of the screen that could be scrolled between via anchor links. Using some basic jQuery functionality I was able to implement smooth scrolling between these links to make the experience that much more visually appealing.
At the time of the site’s creation the client was unable to provide us with copies of their menu though I knew that this information would be very important to integrate into the website at some point in the future. Using some basic jQuery and CSS I developed a simple but appealing accordion dropdown that would serve to display their menu in an engaging way once this content was received.
