A modern new site for

  • Content strategy
  • UX design
  • UI design
  • Web development

The challenge

Kudu Collective is a group of restaurants in South East London that was founded in 2017. We built their first website for them years ago when they were just starting out. Since then they have expanded from a single restaurant to three, opened a cocktail bar and collaborated with a fashion brand to claim a guest spot on the Kings Road. They continue to add exciting plans to the pipeline so we were delighted to be asked to partner with them again.

They recently rebranded so our brief was to design and develop a website to reflect this new brand. They were keen to keep the site minimal and modern, allowing their beautiful photography to shine through. It also  needed to be intuitive with clear call-to-actions , enabling users to reserve a table easily at any of the Kudu locations. It had to be flexible and future-proof so it could grow with them as they continue to expand.

The work

Our Discovery phase was lighter than usual since Kudu was an existing client partner and we already knew them and the business fairly well. But we made sure we spent time understanding what their priorities for the site were, and the visual approach they were interested in.

 

The site structure would be similar to their existing site but a little simplified, so a sitemap helped us quickly work out the direction we needed to take. Once that was agreed, we developed black and white wireframe prototypes, which enabled us to think about the page content and flow.

Moving on from this phase we started work on the UI designs. Here needed a bit more conceptual work as the visual identity had moved on a lot from the existing site. We retained a simple brand palette, but introduced the new restaurant logos and illustrations. Text was pared back, and full bleed video and images came to the fore.

We also brought in some slick animated interactions; keeping everything subtle and intentional but ensuring the site felt premium and reflected the feel of the restaurants.

Once designs were approved, we moved on to development, building out front end flexible components, and integrating them with a WordPress CMS. We worked closely with Kudu’s marketing and social media team, ensuring that newsletter sign-ups for each restaurant would be captured in the best way for their communications plan. The new navigation has in-built flexibility so that in future restaurants can be grouped according to location, ensure that this website should support them for years to come.

The new site provides a more premium, slicker shop window for the restaurant group, and ensures that users are able to easily find out what they need to know before they book and visit the restaurant.