restaurant - updated design

OK, I decided to go with the table top design, as I thought it looked the most sophisticated of the three and would be a good piece to develop.

I aimed my focus on the logo. Verbal feedback showed that the font used for Antibo's was too simplistic. Having a play through the font file on Photoshop, I decided upon Market Deco, a custom font from dafont.com

Trajan Pro

Segoe Script

Market Deco

To me, the Market Deco font is quite Art Deco looking, has a resemblance to the Strada logo and seems quite strong, being a tall typeface. I admittedly do like the Trajan Pro font as I find it looks quite classy and refined, but it lacks the Italian element. OK, not all sites have to have a flag in the corner, as one of my feedback comments said, and on looking at my site, admittedly it could be for any type of food, but I think Market Deco should help steer it a little.

Notice too that I slightly altered the colouring in the background. The olive green of the top two just seems a little drab, so I went for a lighter saturation. Whereas the darker one is quite suave, the new green gives it a fresher feel.

After altering this, I decided that the table top was a bit too cheap looking. I want to create as realistic image as possible, so sourced several wood textures.

 
 

Taking the bottom left image, I again adapted in Photoshop so to have a lighter, less oaky/piny colouring. Noticeably, the tables in Antibo's are dark mahogany, yet an attempt at that didn't bode well with the rest of the fixtures. It seemed too overpowering, and just too dark!

Hence, this is the table top I have decided to go with-

 

I wasn't quite finished here, either. The content pages fill up the left hand side of the page when the user clicks on menus, restaurants etc, however going back to the homepage, it seemed to feel empty in comparison. 

I decided to put to use the tutorials I sourced the other day, and so made a nice shiny web 2.0 label. 

When looking at the site now, it seems to fit in and add finesse. Admittedly, this small screenshot kind of does it an injustice, in that the label appears quite large, and disproportioned. However, in the browser it works. I couldn't now remove the label, the lefthand side needs not look barren. 

Moving forward in this project, I intend to experiment in producing a printer friendly CSS sheet so that the 2 for 1 offer page provides the option to print out a coupon. Furthermore, I might try and use dynamic Google Maps on the Contact page, it's pretty much a standard feature nowadays, online.

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