Case study
Why we built Ceres, and how one mark travels from the sign above the door to a guest’s phone.
01 — The brief
In most venues the menu lives in three places at once: at the print shop, on a subscription platform, and in a pile of files on the managers’ phones. None of the three belongs to the restaurant. Change one price and you have to change it three times — and foreign guests still don’t know what they are ordering. So we built Ceres.
02 — The idea
We started with the name. Ceres is the Roman goddess of grain, growth and the shared table — a fitting patron for software that would live in kitchens. The mark folds a fork into a plate that sweeps upward into one continuous “C”: the gesture of eating, drawn in a single stroke. The wordmark is chiselled and archaic so the brand never sounds like a tech product, and warm gold finishes the rest: grain, candlelight, hospitality.
03 — The mark
The mark had to hold everywhere we would put it, and in a single colour. Gold on dark, dark on light, knocked out of gold. It carries from the flag at the door to the stamp on paper to the icon in a guest’s browser.
Harvest Gold / Ember Ink / Limestone
04 — Palette
Gold is the only accent and we save it for the few places where it means something: the prices, the mark, the lit sign. The ink is warm, almost black. The ground is limestone light, like the facade the sign hangs on. The three colours meet for the first time on a business card.
Harvest Gold
#C8A44A
Ember Ink
#131313
Limestone
#EBE8E1
Carbon
#1F1F1F
Type
Headlines carry the character of cut lettering. Running text stays neutral and legible on a phone, in a kitchen, in low light.
Аа / Aa
Unbounded · 200—900 / Schibsted Grotesk · 400—600
05 — Applications
Every piece was drawn to be actually produced, not to look good in a deck. The stickers come off a roll so a whole room of tables can be done in one pass. The printed menu is stitched so single pages can be swapped. The code on the table is large enough for a phone to catch it in low light.
06 — The product
An identity would not have done the job as a PDF of rules. So it became an application: the manager writes the menu on the computer at the venue, decides how it looks, translates it and publishes it at their own address. The guest scans the code on the table and sees the menu in their own language, with live availability and the option to order.
The result
One brand and one tool that cover all three of the places we started from. The menu changes in seconds, the paper comes out of the same file, and there is no longer a third-party platform standing between a restaurant and its guests.
Let’s begin
Start with 1 free trial month, with no commitment. We load your first menu, generate working QR codes for the venue and give you full access to the software, so you can see the benefits for your business before you pay anything at all.
