Catering Becomes Story Telling. Stop Narrating & Enjoy. Yum!
Marigold Catering RWD Website
Marigold Catering is Cleveland, Ohio’s premier catering service, offering gourmet menus, event planning, and unequivocal service—so how do you improve on that? My solution, rethink what catering companies actually provide, and recontextualize that meaning.
Of course it’s always delicious meal, superb service & event planning, but it in reality they are providing much much more. Fresh out of college and working on my first big boy project, I started to question what could make a catering company that already has a superb reputation and steady business improve and take it to the next level. So I deconstructed what catering actually is. It just so happens that much of my design theory was born out of this project.
Examining the process of what a client goes through, and how they experience their catered event, a workmate and I came up with the idea that catering companies are not just providers of food and service, they take your catered experience, turn it into a story, and take the role of narrator so that you can enjoy your event the way it should be—stress free and as a character in the story. Marigold Catering takes every consideration and allows you to tell the your own tale as the one who experienced the event, rather than narrating it.
And thus, the concept of catering as a means of story–telling was born and sewn into this beautiful website and a whole new marketing campaign.
Let’s Tell Your Story
The whole concept driving this website’s form and function are based in storytelling—the idea that Marigold offers its customers a service that allows them to really enjoy they’re catered events without worry. The outcome is a memorable story, packed with meaningful experiences.
This concept not only is baked into the website, but into all marketing materials since the site’s launch in 2012.
The Site Is Like A Book
One of the coolest things, in my opinion, is the UX and layout of the site. I designed it to read like a book; you have your chapter title pages, with each chapter’s content pages scrollable below, and in some instances left to right. I spent many hours and iterations getting the wire-framing and IA to mesh with the storytelling motif. It is because of this UX and the usage of such large photography that this website won multiple Golden W3 Awards for 2012. I am very proud of that.
Icons Created For The New Website & Marketing Materials
I briefly mentioned some of the left to right navigation you will find in many places within this site. I consider these points to be subchapters of the whole story—asides if you will, that elaborate on particular and important details. The next several images will hopefully show you what I mean.
A Side Scrolling Example
The following three images are a representation of the side scrolling within chapters I’ve mentioned above. This is the mechanism that let’s users dive deeper into the culture, the people, and the food & service Marigold Catering supplies. Check out this page for an interactive example of the profiles of the people who are the management of Marigold Catering.
The Words Are Supplementary To The Imagery
Just take a look for yourself. We were very luck to have a very large library of images to choose from when designing this site, and I think that is pretty clear right from the homepage. We wanted to be minimal, but meaningful with the words we placed on top of imagery. It’s like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, plus the ones you put on top of it.
Completely RWD
What can I say about how we did this RWD project. It wasn’t just media-queries in css, but a ton of dynamic placing of content with javascript. A brilliant execution of design and technology, especially for 2012.
