Cielito Querido Café
Very nice Mexican café. So much time and energy has gone into this and a fantastic use of colour and type. Just goes to show you don’t need supersize product images to get your style and flavour across.
Spotted at The Dieline
C&A as you’ve never seen it before
Who knew C&A could look like this. Just shows what a bit of South American pizazz can do. Of particular note are the light fittings just showing how much can be achieved with simple ideas well executed.
Spotted on LSN Global.
Obsessively interested in everything
Think Quarterly from Google
Google launches Think Quarterly, “a space to take time out and consider what’s happening and why it matters.” This issue is dedicated to data.
The new Waitrose website
Today Waitrose launched their new website. Overall a more streamlined sophisticated look with more to do on the home page.
Gone is the enormous site map in the footer replaced with a neater version. Navigation is cleaner and the ‘value’ bright green is replaced with a more elegant textured brown and olive green.
In the details of particular note are the areas on the introductory slideshow where icons give the viewer the option to click and see more information. In the bricks and mortar world, this ‘getting to know the store’ time is called a decompression zone, here on a website this type of interaction as well as the other tabbed layouts beneath the slideshow create a lot of interest on the home page. Also of note is that these longer home pages look good on a vertical iPad. Starting to see more websites that make better use of the lower half of a vertical screen.
For posterity, below is the old Waitrose website. Here’s the new one www.waitrose.com
Symbology
For those amongst you that are semiotically inclined, here’s The Noun Project. A great resource for pictograms with a nice old school slant. Some of them are very reminiscent of British Rail pictograms pre their redesign by Lloyd Northover in 1999. And they’re free, and downloadable, definitely worth bookmarking.
Centre Commercial – Paris
A lovely looking store, Centre Commercial by Veja opened at the end of last year in Paris. The distressed look is to the fore but what makes it stand apart is the excellence of the cross merchandising, beautifully and elegantly done. Also of note is the lighting, little spots on the wall products and an interesting take on neon chandeliers.
Originally from Another Face in the Crowd
A nice cup of tea and a sit down
Harney & Sons recently opened in SoHo, New York City.
A tasting bar, over 250 varieties of tea and a beautiful store, what more could any tea connoisseur want?
Cross merchandising the Harvey Nichols way
It’s always important to up sell in retail and being obvious about it is not always going to work. Sometime a bit of lateral thinking can go a long way. These ads from Harvey Nichols take cues from ecommerce sites as in ‘people who bought that also bought this’ but really in quality retail this kind of cross merchandising should be the norm, although generally it isn’t.
Three examples here but the full set from the original source on Fuel Your Creativity. Incidentally isn’t this a beautiful colour palette?
D’Espresso – New York
A nice little coffee shop in New York (on Madison Avenue). The optimum word here being little, at only 420 square feet (39 square metres) the designers have done a great job of tricking the eye into making you believe you’re in a larger space. The back wall becomes the floor with the floor and other walls covered in library book wallpaper.
I’m starting to see quite a few smaller shops covering their entire wall space with wallpaper of some description, a quick and easy way to change your look almost overnight, or a bit of theatre if you did it during shopping hours.
Originally from The Cool Hunter.
