Posted on February 17, 2012 at 12:14 pm

Web Design Case Study for Kuro Restaurants

At Unique we’re very proud of our work on the Kuro Asian Cuisine website. KURO was our chance to create a very unique and stylized design piece for our portfolio as it was important for the restaurant to distinguish themselves from their competitors. As the content is usually limited to 1 or 2 paragraphs per page, much of the design is very image-oriented which affords more advanced image styling techniques.

Design:

As always, we started with a mock-up of a few of the featured pages which was submitted with the project proposal. The original design was slightly more graphic-heavy than the final iteration – it was also a little brighter and included more colours overall. As the word “kuro” means “black” in Japanese, we chose to go back and improve on a few of the elements by darkening up the background, making the menu and gallery images black and white until the user hovers over them, and limiting other site element colours to the swatches in our red palette. Below is a snapshot from a month prior to launch:

WordPress Implementaion:

By implementing WordPress as our Content Management System, the KURO staff need only log in to have quick access to editing page content, gallery images and promotions. We are conscious in our design process as to which page elements should be editable by the client making it even easier for their staff to make frequent edits.

Techniques:

  • Gallery – It’s incredibly quick and easy to add, remove and replace photos
  • Restaurant Menu – The staff can edit their menu items individually on the fly.
  • Social Media – A streamlined design, in-line with the style of the site for brand consistency, is located at the bottom of each page. Included is access to the latest newsletter as well as a comment box. Additionally, we created and custom designed their accounts for three social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube)
  • A comment box provides customers with an easy way to submit their opinions and experiences.

Result:

We are delighted to say that the launch of the site resulted in 27 “likes” on Facebook within the first week. Additionally, the creation of the website prompted the staff of KURO to hire a photographer to create an album of high-quality photographs for use within the site and for promotional material. These photos are a timeless asset and are a key to the design of the website.