The first requirement was curating a style guide. After many hours of brainstorming, I created SERVED, a platform dedicated to serving Michelin Star-quality coverage of easy-to-follow recipes, enticing “foodcasts,” relatable blogs and engaging cooking demonstration videos, as a way to combine my passion for graphic design with my culinary high school background.
The brand guide that I created for SERVED includes an explanation of the platform and its values, an audience analysis, primary and secondary logos, logo dos and don’ts, typography, a color palette and examples of design assets in use. In terms of color choices, I decided on bold shades of yellow and red because they are known to stimulate hunger. My secondary color choices include a shade of blue, green and purple because they evoke feelings of trust, health and luxury, respectively.
The second part of the assignment required me to use Adobe Photoshop to design a minimum of three pages (a home page, landing page and story page) for a website for SERVED, all while incorporating the rules from my style guide.
I started the process by sketching, before I added any styling or color. Here are some photos of sketches from the notebook that I keep next to my bed because, of course, the best ideas come to me while I’m sleeping.
For the home page and landing page wireframes, I moved into Adobe Photoshop and made tweaks to the original sketches. In this stage, I decided on a header, navigation and hero, but I was still playing around with the footer, call-to-action and article thumbnails. I also changed the width of the content from the sketches. Instead of taking up the entire viewport width, the content now has some breathing room around it.
In the final designs, I really emphasized the pictures of the food dishes – which are the most important part – using a 3-column layout. I also denoted each content section with a specific color to add organization to the site. Overall, the design is characterized by clean, straight lines, a sense of symmetry and a minimalistic feel that I am quite proud of.
Interactive design panels of the website can be viewed here.
