Case Study : Mermaid Café
The owner of the Mermaid Café, Sandy Roberts, requested a logo design and branding for her new cafe opening in Clearwater Beach, Florida. Ms. Roberts requested a website to give them an online presence, depicting their menu, links to social media sites, and other information about their new restaurant.
Step 1:
Ms. Roberts stated that she would like the café’s logo to be circular, and very simple, preferably two to three colors. She stressed that she would her website to have different shades of ocean colors, mostly blues. She also stated that she loves shells, starfishes, coral and abstract/weathered touches.
Step 2:
I designed the logo (Figure 1) for the Mermaid Café beginning with a medium blue circle, with an ocean wave through the middle, and a mermaid’s tail diving into the wave. I used white text with teal dots in between each letter to keep with the beach decorations.
Figure 1. Mermaid Cafe Logo.
Step 3:
I began creating the website Home page (Figure 2) in different shades of blues. Since the theme was “beachy”, and “underwater”, I created a wave across the top with white crashes of wave, and blue above to depict the sky with subdued clouds.
Under the wave is the “seascape” where a mermaid is swimming to the right off the page. Also included are shells, air bubbles, seahorses, fish, sea vegetation and other underwater sea life, subdued in light blue.
I added the website navigation menu to the left in the seascape area, because I didn’t want to draw attention away from the wave across the top. When a webpage is current, the navigation text changes from gray to blue, and a coral starfish appears to the left.
The bottom of the webpage shows the “sea floor” in a deeper blue, to keep with the beach/underwater theme, with coral and sea vegetation, along with some starfish, and another horizontal menu for easy navigation.
Figure 2. Mermaid Cafe Home Page.
Step 4:
Each page has content that I placed in a light gray box with transparency so that the seascape underneath is still visible while viewing (Figure 3). In order to create a “weathered” look, I created two different colors of gray with a jagged outline edge on each box.
Figure 3. Mermaid Cafe Appetizer Page.
The Home page (Figure 2) has a Welcome title and links to each page in the menu. I added teal around this menu to make it stand out from the other pages.
Each menu page has clean, fresh pictures of a few menu items surrounded by a weathered edge of color for contrast (Figure 3). I also capitalized the name of each dish, and to match with the rest of the page, I created the names in a coral/salmon color.
Step 6:
To finish off the website, I added social media links across the top right for anyone that wants to follow or contact the owner. In addition to the social media links, there is also a contact page (Figure 4) added with directions, a map, phone number, and hours.
Figure 4. Mermaid Cafe Contact Us Page.
Final Thoughts
Ms. Roberts was satisfied with the website design, and decided to move forward with business cards, stationery, advertising, flyers, brochures, and posters to continue to market her new brand.
To view each page, please visit:
http://www.patds.com/mermaid-cafe/