Kolamba East
Supporting Kolamba’s newest venture, an elevated dining experience that’s still unapologetically Sri Lankan. Identity and updated website.
| Year | 2024 |
|---|---|
| Services | Visual Identity Website Design |
| Studio | James Matthews |
-
‘Kolamba’ logotype
Lou AndrewsPhotography & Direction
Milo BrownInterior Design
Fare Inc.Website Development
Side Dish Media
The brief
Kolamba has always been about celebrating the vibrant flavours of Sri Lanka and offering a welcoming, stylish setting for customers to enjoy them in. After years of success in Soho, Kolamba East was born— an elevated dining experience focussing on showstopping feasting plates, bespoke cocktails and curated wines, all in a luxuriously stunning interior.
The challenge was to visualise this new extension of the Kolamba brand, ensuring that the right customers are targeted and the identity hits the right notes of this new, elevated vision.
The identity
The first step was to append the existing Kolamba logo with ‘East’ to denote the new location. From there the task was to add some visual cues to elevate East from its Soho counterpart, whilst staying true to the original Kolamba design kit so that they still feel connected and consistent with one another.
The dark teal and cool neutral tones of the Soho colour scheme feature as the base palette, and are then complemented by a warm brown— inspired by the richness and warmth of the interior design.
The original Kolamba brand design features beautifully colourful illustrations, depicting the sights and souls of Sri Lanka. However this vibrance wasn’t quite appropriate for this new setting, so instead, East’s identity features historical illustrations depicting the Sri Lankan landscape applied using tones of the new palette. The result is a refined, high-end feel that still communicates the Sri Lankan roots and celebrates the country’s beauty.
The website
When expanding or adding a new arm to a business, updating all necessary touchpoints is going to be crucial to its success, as raising awareness and giving customers clear understanding of the developments is so important.
I was tasked with redesigning the current Kolamba website to incorporate East and make some further updates to content. With the new business format and the new, distinct experiences on offer, we worked together to formulate a well-considered content map for the site, ensuring everything was clear, user-friendly and that each restaurant had its own dedicated space.
Our approach was to create a templated format for each restaurant, making finding content predictable for the user. A sub-navigation was added for easy browsing through the page by giving the user the power to jump to what they need, quickly.
Kolamba is famous for its vibrant food and stunning interiors, so the site design is really focussed around photography, immersing the user before they even step foot through the door.
Booking a table is one of the primary call to actions for a restaurant website a fixed button was included on the restaurant microsites to make this process as easy as possible.
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Aushi Meewella
Title, Kolamba
Year
2024
Services
Visual Identity
Website Design
Agency
James Matthews
‘Kolamba’ logotype
Lou Andrews
Photography & Direction
Milo Brown
Interior Design
Fare Inc.
Website Development
Side Dish Media
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