Featured Project: New branding and responsive web site for Fox Restaurant Concepts

How do you take a hip company with its own corporate identity and 12 separate and individual brands, rebrand the parent company in a compelling way without detracting from the other brands, and create a web site that puts them all together in one place — and is completely mobile-friendly?

That was the challenge the Kitchen Sink Studios team was given by Fox Restaurant Concepts, which hired us to redo the company's brand identity and create a new corporate web site that showcases the 12 different restaurant concepts the company operates.

And it wasn't a rebrand of Corporation X. Fox Restaurant Concepts is known throughout the region as the creator of some of the most exceptional dining experiences around. Our mission was to convey their sense of quality, style and design not just for the corporate brand, but for each one of the individual restaurant concepts as well.

Step 1 was the brand, and we realized that we needed to create something visually compelling but that wouldn't detract from the other brands. It had to be complementary, strong on its own but not the focus of attention. We created a variety of different concepts, but owner Sam Fox gravitated toward cleaner looks with dark color palettes, and with the flexibility to be used in a variety of different settings. The look you see here is now being incorporated throughout the organization, and is a dramatic change from their previous brand identity, which had grown dated. 

Sam Fox reviewing some of the initial branding concepts. 

Some of our initial design concepts. 

The approved brand identity.

Now, the web site, which you can view here. The site needed to check the following boxes:

• Provide key information about the company.

• Spotlight each of the restaurant concepts, with a focus on their individual brands.

• Visually represent the experience of dining at each restaurant.

• Functionally provide all the information a customer may need, including hours, locations, reservation information and anything else.

• Provide a variety of other services, including group events, gift cards, promotions and events and feedback forms.

Oh, and it needed to work not only on desktop, but on tablets and mobile devices as well.

The solution was a responsive-coded site that adapts to the size of the viewer's screen, whether on a smart phone or a computer monitor. The site also includes a great deal of high-quality professional photography — the vast majority of which was taken by David Fox, Sam Fox's brother and a terrific photographer.

The site includes a full back-end content management system that allows almost all content on the site to be updated through WordPress with any web browser, making it easy for the Fox team to edit items that change on a regular basis, such as menus and hours. They can even easily add new locations, a critical feature for the fast-growing company.

It's the most complicated site our team has built in HTML5 (which we use exclusively these days; we did some pretty complex sites in Flash back in the day), and it was a great way for our web team to flex its muscles when it comes to building a site that works on the full spectrum of devices.

We're very pleased with the new look we created for Fox Restaurant Concepts. Now if you'll excuse us, working with all these great restaurants has made us hungry...