Nicole Bakes Cakes
Objective
The Sweet Reward of Simplicity
Nicole Bakes Cakes is a boutique bakery specializing in custom cakes and desserts in Southern California. Nicole, the face of the business, has been a professional pastry chef for more than 15 years. Her cake designs vary from playful kids’ birthday pieces to elegant wedding desserts and everything in between. That said, the Nicole Bakes Cakes (NBC) brand did not reflect the reputation her business had acquired since its inception.
This project was completed in partnership with aha!, a boutique branding studio, specializing in cultural entities’, educational institutions’, and non-profit organizations’ identity and graphic design. Nicole was looking for an overhaul of her business identity as well as a full redesign of her old website, created in 2017.
Identity System Design (by our partner, aha!)
Information Architecture/UX
Copywriting
Squarespace Website Design
Squarespace Custom Code
Photography editing & curation
HoneyBook integration
move the slider left to right to see the before & after
Before
After
the logo
The old NBC logo was quite busy and didn’t focus on the product itself. With the new identity, Nicole wanted to feature beautiful typography but also differentiate her brand from her peers in this space. The final design maintains the approachable and whimsical qualities of the brand while elevating its overall look & feel via the modern abstract image of a layered cake.
COLOR PALETTE
The color palette of the brand also got a remake, reducing the number of colors and focusing on 3 different shades of pink with the addition of dark gray and white. The colors work together to create a subtle layered effect on the website and in print collateral, without too stark of a contrast.
This cohesive and strong identity served as a great source of inspiration for on-screen implementation.
pink butter cream
#D6F2E6
pink rosette
#C7A942
strawberry jam
#7F7B37
smokey swirl
#111E2F
platinum
#213941
icing white
#FFFFFF
SITE LOOK & FEEL
The primary goal of the website is to place the cakes at the center of it. Thankfully, Nicole had a lot of beautiful photography that could be featured on the site—our task was to sort through, select, and edit the photos in a consistent way, showing a good range of designs, occasions, and styles.
SITE ARCHITECTURE
Previously, the site navigation seemed busy and somewhat confusing with consultations and booking as two separate pages. After having a conversation about Nicole’s booking and consultation process, we were able to propose a more straightforward content strategy, reducing the navigation from six items to three with a standalone call to action for booking, streamlining the user flow on the site, and eliminating possible hesitation.
As a result of secondary research and competitive benchmarking, we also ended up combining the cakes into one page with a custom sticky anchor links menu, thus eliminating the need for the potential customer to click on too many things. This way they are also presented with more of the cake images all in one place since people are enticed to keep scrolling down the page to see more images.
Visual Elements
The primary goal of the website is to place the cakes at the center of it. Thankfully, Nicole had a lot of beautiful photography that could be featured on the site—our task was to sort through, select, and edit the photos in a consistent way, showing a good range of designs, occasions, and styles.
I love the site!! Such an amazing job on it! […] It’s been easy to navigate and easy for me to make edits.
