Review 4

A restaurant that I consider to be somewhat of competition for our fusion restaurant would most likely be Rainaldi’s restaurant. Rainaldi’s is fine Italian restaurant that is family-oriented with a friendly atmosphere. It has a long list of quality foods and meals options with appealing photos that accompany the menu items. The layout is very clean and simplified. The options of the multiple pages are listed across the top where it is easiest to find. For each of the pages, the sections of food are divided with bold text centered between dotted lines that break up the food categories. A good consistency is met throughout the site involving the set up each page; once you have been on one page, when traveling to another page the user doesn’t have to scramble to figure out where or what they’re looking at. I recognized this during my first look at the site and I had no confusion. As for the colors, I think they were appealing for the kind of restaurant Rainaldi’s is. The tan background I think works well because it is not in anyway distracting to the viewer and works well with any pictures that are shown or any text, rather than have something too dark or too light. I felt that it was a happy medium that the designer chose. Having the tan consume most of the site, it allowed the photos to pop and the ability to play around with accent colors, such as the green and red, also with some purple at the top, used in the rose vines and grapes vines. In addition, these colors perfectly resembled the Italian culture. For the content of the site, the options bar is separated by the the different titles with borders around each of the options creating a 3-D effect. This same border and effect is around the black and white family photos with shadow effects that fall behind. I also noticed how a nice texture fell on the tan background, however it fades as you go down the page when the user hits the text, which is good so the text is easy to read. Comparing our group’s site with this one, I feel that we both are accomplishing the same design ideas. For one, our group thinks its important to having a background that will not distract the viewer away from the content, and so everything presented on the page is made legible. That is our first concern. After having a successful color choice, the design and secondary color choices, such as our choices of red, green, and yellow, will accent throughout the site’s pages. Like that of Rainaldi’s, our color choices are based on the ethnicity of our restaurant, incorporating colors of the two country’s flags, both Italian and German. In hopes of our project, we look to make our atmosphere kind and friendly, while presenting fine dishes, having delicious homemade foods using authentic ingredients, and having a somewhat fancy aspect to our customer’s dinner experience. In addition to this, to make ours stand out, we look to score on our content, providing as much information as possible whether it is about our dishes, contact information, or about our restaurant, history, and dining, that way we leave our visitors without question.We tend to make sure our site will appeal to the eye and have our design layouts reflect the kind of restaurant we want it to be. We will make sure our graphics throughout the pages are unified. For example, Rainaldi’s used 3-D effects throughout their pages with text, navigations, and photos, while the graphics such as the rose vines, and grapes used for the top border looked as if they were pasted on. Unity is our biggest concern and should be any designers.