The Rice Garden restaurant chain wanted to update its web presence, which hadn’t been touched since the mid-90s. Additionally, it wanted to upgrade its branding — the clichéd imagery used in the past was limiting to their vision for fresh, wok-fired, and Asian-inspired cuisine.
As we started the discovery process for the new website, it was clear that the new brand attributes didn’t work with the old logo. While it had brand equity, having been in use for 20 years, the medallion had been hastily created in the early days of the business and was based very obviously on a large, national competitor’s logo. We spent a lot of time working within and without the medallion shape, working with and without the rice shoot symbol, trying to create a symbol that said “Wok Fired Asian” … until inspiration struck. The final logo forms the bowl of the wok in the negative space between the wok’s handle and the flame that comes from holding the wok over the “jet fire” in the Rice Garden’s kitchens.
For the website, we designed and developed a custom theme for WordPress that features their gorgeous photography and displays beautifully on both desktop and mobile. We incorporated their existing customer email signup into the new site and integrated a new store locator that uses Google Maps to display their locations throughout the US.
