Tell us about yourself.

Tarquin Rees: Okapi Creative is a Barcelona based collective of three design professionals from the US and UK. We offer web design and development, logo/identity creation, and custom illustration services that are elegant, functional, and accessible.

What is the site all about?

Tarquin Rees: Grace Restaurant is a newly establish, highly acclaimed Los Angeles restaurant which has been attracting rave reviews in the local and national press. The brainchild of a multi-award winning chef and former ‘Iron Chef’ winner, Grace restaurant focuses on New American Cuisine in a relaxed and eclectic atmosphere.

The project brief was for a design that reflected Grace’s aesthetic - the restaurant’s aesthetic has been created by renowned designer Michael Berman whose signature “American Trans-Modern” look has been given exciting new twists throughout the bright and airy space which is based around a soothing palate of brown, green, orange, and rose.  It was important, also, to ensure that all pages could be updated by any staff, regardless of technical expertise.

We decided to compliment the look and feel of Grace with a completely original design concept rather than to merely echo the established aesthetic. We also decided to utilize ExpressionEngine to enable all dynamic functionality including automatically updating menu headers which would change to reflect new events that were posted to the news sections.

What were some of the leading factors that led you to choose ExpressionEngine for Grace Restaurant?

Tarquin Rees: We have created several sites based around ExpressionEngine now and, to be honest, there is just no competition for the client-base we are designing for; small to medium size companies that want the functionality of a full-featured custom-made CMS with full support but in an off-the-shelf package, not to mention price. ExpressionEngine beats hands-down many systems with similar functionality that are many times the price.

From the point of view of Okapi as a design agency, we have yet to encounter a client request that ExpressionEngine could not fulfill and the potential for expansion and overall ease of use makes it our first choice for the majority of projects we are currently encountering.

Did you use any plugins, modules, or other custom modifications to develop the site?

Tarquin Rees: No, we did not need to utilize any custom-made extensions or add-ons for the Grace project. There was a bit of Javascript required and some IE specific code for PNG transparency but other than that nothing ExpressionEngine specific.

What was your favorite part of building the site?

Tarquin Rees: Being a die-hard foodie, I can say that my favorite part of this project was definitely drooling over the wine lists and menus! In technical terms I very much enjoy wrestling with seemingly intractable problems but in general, once one has passed a certain point in the learning curve, ExpressionEngine does not actually present too many challenges and is in effect fairly transparent. My favorite aspect of this project was really the CSS coding and the implementation of the site in straight xHTML/CSS.

We often get restaurant owners asking if they can use ExpressionEngine to store their menu, which you have done.  What advice would you have for those wishing to do this?

Tarquin Rees: From a purely design perspective I personally think that ‘less is more’ in this regard and that menus should really provide a ‘taster’ which should ideally encourage people to visit. I sometimes doubt the efficacy of long, boring, or unstyled lists but I think that a small selection of signature dishes which are secondary to an attractive graphical element is definitely the way to go!

For the Grace project we employed Javascript to hide and scroll the menus which had the advantage of skirting around the problem of long menus taking up large amount of screen real estate and compromising the overall design.

You said that one of the main goals was to allow any staff member to easily update the site.  How did you accomplish this, and how was it ultimately received by the staff?  What advice would you give for others with that as their ultimate goal?

Tarquin Rees: At first we thought of working on a wrapper utilizing the Stand Alone Entry Form which would simplify the UI and pare it down to the bare necessities of the client’s needs, but as the project progressed the client wanted every single piece of info on the site to be easily updated by themselves (for example, initially static pages like bios etc - we are still in the process of doing this actually) and the SAEF approach might have become an inelegant solution under these circumstances.

We were looking at other approaches but when working through the details with the client they managed to grasp the ExpressionEngine Control Panel easier than we had expected! We merely restricted access to areas that might confuse them through the members functionality and voila!

This is a good example of what I love about ExpressionEngine, actually - somehow it manages to actually be perfectly targeted at techies like me and also non-tech savvy users simultaneously. Sometimes when immersed solely in the tech side one can look for solutions to ‘simplify’ things for the client but then find ExpressionEngine is ahead of you and they have covered that base so you don’t really need to!