Web Design for Two of Glasgow’s Most Established Sister Restaurants

Being trusted to design a bespoke website for a Glasgow culinary institution is exciting enough - but two Glasgow culinary institutions…? Here’s the story of how we revitalised the online home of Ubiquitous Chip and Stravaigin, two of the west end of Glasgow’s most beloved and established restaurants.

Approaching Branding Design Tweaks for Very Established Restaurants

In the case of both restaurants, tweaking the branding and refining the design elements available to tell their story was a key first step. This meant building carefully on what already existed - Ubiquitous Chip is now fifty years old, and is arguably the most famous restaurant in the city; Stravaigin was once the disruptive younger sibling but is now thirty years old itself with a legacy of its own stretching back to the mid 90s. So in both cases, there’s a need to be very delicate with what’s already there.

For the Chip, all they had was their famous logo, which made for a blank canvas across the rest of the brand. We took reference photos throughout the venue and derived a brand colour palette of earthy greens, and blues, with pops of vivid mustard and maroon reflecting their bold furniture. We brought in vintage line illustrations of foliage, to add textures and to reflect the unique, continental indoor-outdoor feel of their leafy courtyard.

In the case of Stravaigin, the brief was to make a super minimalist and modern feeling black and white site, to serve as an agnostic platform for the venue itself which is full of natural finishes, unique decor, and eccentric curios from far flung places. So the focus became using white space and beautiful light typography to really contrast against the busy, organic feeling venue. Later, we decided to cycle through some fading colours on the homepage to differentiate between the different sections of the venue.

In both cases, we knew that we wanted to build the designs around bespoke video production that we would shoot specifically to occupy certain sections of the web design - which meant big opportunities to really convey the spirit of both venues with striking moving imagery that we could completely control.

Shooting Bespoke Video as a Key Component of Web Design

It’s a significant advantage to be handling both the web design/build and the video production in-house for projects like these. We knew for the Ubiquitous Chip homepage that we wanted to come up with one striking image that would capture something about their food and also about their unique environment. We also knew that we wanted the camera to be static, and therefore we wanted all the movement to come from action within the frame. We shot a high angle on a table overhanging their pond, so that you can see the ripples in the water and the fish swimming on one side, and a chef pouring a jus onto the plate on the other. It’s an unusual and bold view of the restaurant and it pulls in several things that make Ubiquitous Chip special - from the creative food to the unique surrounds.

We used the bold logo placement - full width and large across the bottom of the hero section; readable, but cropped off - to indicate that this was still the heroic, self-confident Ubiquitous Chip that you know and love, but that it still has a sense of subversion and surprise and reinvention even after fifty years.

In the case of Stravaigin, we initially planned to do a scrollable video, so that the user was controlling the pace of the video playing with their cursor or their finger. So we shot every frame of it with the camera pulling out slowly, to mimic the action the user would take manually. In the end, the UX was better with sections of the video just autoplaying in correspondence with different bits of the site copy on the homepage. The video content was built around several important aspects of the venue’s character - beautiful high-end adventurous food; the thoroughly dog-friendly policy; their legendary folk jams; the brand new hireable cellar events space - and contrasts against the stark minimalism of the site design.

Tailored Back-End Development for Their Exact Needs

In the case of Ubiquitous Chip, there are six different component parts of the venue (two restaurants and three separate bookable bars, plus a rooftop terrace). So we built them a bespoke back-end interface with one dedicated section for each venue - so that the user can update menus or opening hours or images for that particular subvenue in the one centralised place, and then the site will dynamically update globally. Similarly, we created one central menu repo that would dynamically feed menu updates to every place in the site that loaded a menu, and we did the same for booking widgets. It’s essentially a website back-end that’s reverse-engineered based on exactly what it’s like to work there.

With Stravaigin, the bespoke requirements were far less elaborate - the key thing was an easily updated interface that would allow for quick creation of events pages, which were the element of the site most likely to be changed regularly.

Do you need help creating a website or branding for your business? Don’t hesitate to get in touch.