Velvet Pour

Designing for mood without losing usability

The goal was to create a site that felt intimate and atmospheric while still making essential actions like browsing the menu, learning about the bar, and making a reservation clear and easy to access.

This project was created in response to a course brief focused on designing and building a responsive WordPress website for a restaurant or eatery. The final outcome needed to combine a simple brand system, strong imagery, and modular layouts with a clean user experience across screen sizes.

Make a bar website feel elevated, not overdesigned

Restaurant sites need to do a few things well, fast. Visitors should immediately understand the vibe, find the menu, and access reservation information without hunting through cluttered content.

For Velvet Pour, I wanted the site to feel warm and polished, with a sense of evening atmosphere, but still stay clean and structured enough to work across desktop and mobile.

A restrained identity built around contrast and tone

The brief required a simple brand identity using a wordmark, a limited colour palette, and one or two Google Fonts. That pushed the design toward restraint rather than decoration, which suited the cocktail bar concept well.

I leaned into a darker, warmer visual tone to support the feeling of an intimate evening space, then balanced that with clean layout spacing and readable typography so the site still felt modern and functional.

• Refined
• Warm
• Moody
• Inviting
• Editorial

Built around the core restaurant tasks

I used Velvet Pour as a fictional brand concept and built the site around the core tasks a visitor would expect from a cocktail bar website: understanding the atmosphere, exploring the menu, finding practical information, and making a reservation.

Less clutter, better hierarchy

Rather than overloading the site with too many decorative sections, I centered the experience around a few essentials: discovering the brand, previewing the menu, and reserving a table. This kept the homepage focused and made the navigation more intuitive.

The layout also had to work within WordPress and Divi, so each section was designed to function as a flexible content block that could stack cleanly across breakpoints. That made consistency and spacing especially important throughout the build.