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2015

Greg Cafe

A site for a chain of roughly 120 branches, at a time when most chain sites in Israel still looked like a catalogue.

UX, UI and product definition for the Greg Cafe website, as part of my work at True Adv. A WordPress site with a fully custom design, not a template.
The Greg Cafe homepage: a tile grid of food photography, menu and branches
The homepage. The main navigation is a grid of living tiles rather than a text menu, and each tile carries its own photograph or illustration.
The site in motion, at its own address: gregcafe.co.il. Tiles swap and content enters without a page reload.
The structural skeleton of the homepage, before the visual layer
The definition layer: the same grid without the photography and without the colour. This is where each tile's relative weight and contents were decided.

Why this was ahead of its time

In 2015 most food chain sites in Israel were catalogues: a menu, a branch list, a form. Here we went for a rich visual language built on photography, illustration and typography, and a tile grid that is both the navigation and the content. The site ran on WordPress, but with no template: every screen was defined and designed from scratch.

The real challenge was scale. Around 120 branches, each needing a page with hours, location, kosher status, accessibility and shifting attributes, without the system falling apart and without the pages reading like a form.

A Greg Cafe branch page: a photo of the place, opening hours, a map and a list of amenities
A branch page. A photograph of the actual place, travel details, a map and a checked list of amenities. Every branch gets the same structure without losing its character.

Where it is today

The site is no longer live. Greg Cafe has replaced it since. What remains is this record, and I keep it here because the work stands on its own.