With the increasing rate of pop-ups, small businesses and other independent brands following the worldwide pandemic, it’s safe to say that creating something original without cutting corners is no easy feat. More often than not, whatever you come up with has been done already and likely has been done better.
PokeNom however proves that there’s still room for fresh ideas to thrive if you’re driven enough.
What It's All About
PokeNom challenges some of the shortcomings in different, fresh and flavourful food in the East of England. Whilst a lovely hot sausage roll can’t go amiss, expanding your palate shouldn’t be as hard as it seems to be – especially for anyone with dietary restrictions or allergies.
What makes PokeNom stay true to its goal is Kate, the owner, and her personal interest in seeing it happen. Her son was born with several allergies and providing a varied and interesting diet with those restrictions is riddled with stress, which is what PokeNom aims to reduce as much as possible.
The Approach
The first step in bringing any existing brand into the digital world is to design everything with the meaning of the brand in mind, whether you display that meaning through colours, style or function.
In PokeNom’s case we decided that every instance of the brand should be synonymous with the key message that whenever you see the PokeNom logo, you should know you’re in safe hands and therefore colours and style were our areas of focus.
With a logo already designed and vibrant colours to match, our job was to design a website that could match the level of liveliness that the PokeNom brand evokes.
The Method
We find that our design plans are best executed when there are well described, clear-cut stages outlined that we follow, with time in each to allow for experimentation.
First up is an overall pass at typography, since the majority of content absorbed from a website is the written word. In most cases, it’s better to find a close match of a Google Font to the font used for the logo for the headings across the website. It reduces load times for end user devices and it lessens the server load for requests to serve the font, which is crucial for sites with a high amount of expected traffic.
Apart from exceptional cases or truly abstract designs (such as student portfolios), the most important thing for secondary fonts is readability, particularly for mobile devices and small print. One of the leading fonts for this is Roboto, a versatile font designed by Google itself. However we felt that we needed something more relaxed and a little lighter, so Source Sans Pro provided a far better fit.
Next up is the layout, which is the best opportunity to make use of negative space and ultimately defining how your content comes across. Since our aim is a fun and no stress brand, space is our friend and we want to make use of it well. Gaps for text to breathe, padding so images stand out on their own and wide brushing curves gave us a perfect blend so we could make colours and content pop, without one outweighing the other.
Imagery is the third stop along the way, where it’s time to bring it all together in a nice little bow. At this stage, we’ve got the tone set, but we want to invoke visualisation and incentivise customers to buy those mouth watering Poke Bowls. So we want images with a varied colour range, a clear focus on the product and no other distractors. Fun, Flavourful and Simple.
Before we sign off on a job well done, a final pass is done over the visuals after a day, to allow a fresh set of eyes. Linguistics on written content is checked to make sure that the voice of the brand is kept throughout.
Every client journey begins with our predefined design plan, but each project can wildly change the route we take and the decisions we make. We prefer to focus on the aspects of an individual journey that we find insightful and interesting to showcase in these examples, since there are a lot of core points that repeat themselves, so if you feel like there’s more you’d like to know about a particular project, please reach out to us.
