Cafe Mornings
2025
Brand Design, UX/UI Design, Development
About
Cafe Mornings is a family-run Korean cafe and market in the Catskills, serving breakfast and lunch alongside curated pantry items and gifts. Their visitors include locals, families, and food-driven travelers passing through the scenic Route 28 highway.
Cafe Mornings had no cohesive brand system. Their existing website lacked narrative, navigation clarity, and personality, making it difficult to communicate the cafe’s full offering beyond food service.
My Role
• Supported UX/UI strategy through wireframes and design
iteration
• Developed site pages in Squarespace with light custom code
• Designed and prototyped micro-interactions (buttons, hover
states, loading animations) - Worked within an existing
illustration system, translating assets into modular UI
layouts
• Created offboarding documentation for client handoff
Constraints
• No existing content hierarchy or defined categories
• Squarespace platform restricts out-of-the-box layouts
requiring modular, low-maintenance layouts
• Small budget and limited development scope
• Brand needed to represent multiple offerings while still
feeling cohesive
Key Design Decisions
Narrative-led homepage structure
The homepage was designed to introduce Cafe Mornings as a place and a story before functioning as a menu or shop, helping first-time visitors understand the brand’s personality and breadth of offerings.
Clear content hierarchy
Navigation and page structure prioritized clarity and ease of discovery (menu, market, story) to ensure the playful visual language never interfered with usability.
Illustration as system, not decoration
Illustration assets were tastefully integrated into layouts to support information on the page and add to the site’s character without overwhelming content
Results
The final site presents Cafe Mornings as a cohesive brand rather than a single-use cafe, with a clear content structure, optimized product inventory, and an inviting, colorful, illustration-driven UI. Designing a narrative-driven site required balancing personality with clear communication. While we pushed the visual language and imagery, we made sure that information structure was prioritized and our layout decisions were intentional. We achieved a warm and playful feeling in the UI by exercising subtle interaction details and tasteful placement of designed elements rather than filling every space with visual excess.
