A Cheerful New Brand, Collateral, and Website for Dragonfly Café

Branding|Creative|Web Design

Dragonfly Café is a social enterprise of Raphael Village, a New Orleans-based organization providing education, life-skills, and vocational training opportunities for children and adults with exceptionalities. Partially staffed by members of Raphael Village’s young adult program, The Guild, Dragonfly Café opened in fall 2021 in Raphael Village’s Town Center. The café serves breakfast and lunch, provides catering services through the Bakery + Market, and hosts private events.

As a new restaurant, the Dragonfly Café team came to us in need of a new brand identity; an easy-to-update food menu; and a website that could accept café reservations, catering orders, and private event requests. Our Design & Development team got to work crafting this set of new items.

This project won a 2022 Indigo Bronze Award in the Restaurants / Cafe category. We are honored to be recognized, and we’re thankful that our partnership with Dragonfly Café could make it happen. You can read more about the Indigo Awards here.

Colorful Branding for a New Café

Starting from scratch, our design team created a new brand for Dragonfly Café that focused visually on delight, warmth, and familiarity.

Color Palette

Dragonfly Café’s color palette bridges the gap between professionalism and warmth. It’s warm and friendly with its saturated accent color, but still maintains an organic and natural quality with earthy tones.

Typography

With the combination of an accessible hand-drawn font for headings and a simplified sans serif for body text, Dragonfly Café’s typography displays the brand’s welcoming, warm, and familiar aspects.

Logos

The Dragonfly Café logo depicts a dragonfly in flight, a symbol of the transformational journeys of the students and young adults who work there. The logo is familiar and intricate all at once—the image of the dragonfly is easy to discern, but is also very detailed and whimsical with the touches of watercolor. We produced four versions of the logo to ensure its usability at any size or in any space; we also created single-color variations of the logo for smaller and simpler uses.

Dragonfly Café’s new logos

Illustrations

Dragonfly Café’s brand includes watercolor illustrations and dashed lines as additional branding elements. The watercolor illustrations, which include depictions of fresh produce and café items, speak to Dragonfly Café’s approachable and inviting personality. They also add a bit of visual interest and fun to the brand. The dashed lines loosely recall the flight path of a dragonfly; they assist in enhancing the overall extent of the brand, and add a playful aspect that also guides customers’ eyes through the website and menu.

Crafting Branded Collateral Pieces

Working from Dragonfly Café’s new brand, we created a single-sheet paper menu for the café’s future customers, as well as a quarter-sheet specials menu.

Restaurant Menu

The main paper menu incorporates many of Dragonfly Café’s new brand elements, including their typography, food illustrations, and dashed lines representing the path of a dragonfly. A big focus for this part of the project was creating a menu that the Dragonfly Café team could easily edit in the future. To achieve this goal, we made a template for the text portion of the menu and trained their team on how to use it.

Specials Menu

We designed the quarter-size specials menu to be easy to both edit and print fully in-house. We created a design that used black ink only, made at a size that can be printed four times on a standard letter-size piece of paper.

Dragonfly Café customer holds the new paper menu

A Time-Saving, Easy-to-Update Restaurant Website

Dragonfly Café needed a new website that could show off its delicious menu and accept café reservations, catering orders, and private event requests in a streamlined, easy-to-manage format that wouldn’t take additional time away from its busy managers. We built a custom menu, integrated the café’s reservation system, and built two custom forms for catering orders and private event requests to make this website as functional as possible for the Dragonfly Café team.

Digital Menu

A major component of any restaurant’s website is its digital menu. For Dragonfly Café, we made sure to build a menu that’s easy for the café team to update, simple for users to navigate, and that looks good. The café team can quickly add, edit, and remove menu items; place items into different sections of the menu; and add badges to display items that are vegan or gluten free. Customers can also use the section links at the top of the page to jump to specific menu sections, making for a more efficient menu-viewing experience.

Dragonfly Café's menu in four places on iPhones

Custom Bakery + Market catering form on Dragonfly Café's new website

Custom Catering Order Form

The Bakery + Market at Dragonfly Café provides catering services in addition to the café’s regular menu items. We built a custom catering order form on this website to accommodate several of the café’s specific requirements, including the ability to show or hide fields for seasonal items; use conditional logic to display additional fields based on previous responses; and incorporate the vegetarian, vegan, and gluten free badges also seen on the main food menu.

OpenTable integration on Dragonfly Café's website

OpenTable Reservation Integration

Dragonfly Café uses OpenTable for its reservation system; we integrated OpenTable into the Reservations page, where users can begin the reservation process with just one click.

Private Event Request Form

Dragonfly Café hosts private events upon request. To simplify this process for the café team, we built an online event request form to collect information from potential hosts.

From the Client

Online Optimism helped us to build something great and easy to manage just out of an idea that we had. They were so helpful throughout this process, making sure that we could give our input and have what we needed. We had a lot of different cooks in the kitchen, so to speak, when it came to thinking about how the website needed to function, look and feel; OO helped us find a cohesive voice and brand. They used their expertise to build something that we all love.

Twyla Mount ,

Bakery + Market Chef

Dragonfly Café

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A Cheerful New Brand, Collateral, and Website for Dragonfly Café