Japanoods

Wordpress | SEO | Content Creation | Branding | App Design

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Creating a Noodle Restaurant Review Site In Tokyo

Japanoods is a brand with a simple mission to spread awareness and knowledge about the myriad of noodle options inside Japan. The website is a blog set up with information about trending restaurants in Japan, so tourists or non-Japanese speaking foreigners know the best spots to visit while they're in Japan.

The website was first created using Wordpress and there are future designs for a mobile app to help people find shops more quickly. All of the content and the majority of the photos were written and taken by me.

Creating a Noodle Restaurant Review Site In Tokyo

Japanoods is a brand with a simple mission to spread awareness and knowledge about the myriad of noodle options inside Japan. The website is a blog set up with information about trending restaurants in Japan, so tourists or non-Japanese speaking foreigners know the best spots to visit while they're in Japan.

The website was first created using Wordpress and there are future designs for a mobile app to help people find shops more quickly. All of the content and the majority of the photos were written and taken by me.

The Challenge

Spread the love of noodles around the world and create a better way to find information while travelling through Japan.

Outcome

I designed and developed a website, and worked with a team to design an app to help people choose where to eat while they're in Tokyo using our noodle database.

Creating the Brand

A New Food Website

This project started from observing other similar ramen blogs based in Japan. I noticed that there was a lack of noodle diversity in the food websites, so I created this website with the hope that I could make an organized database for good noodles in Japan. Part of this was also after hearing that David Chang, the celebrity chef, claimed the best ramen in Japan was Ippudo. As an ex-pat living in Japan for over five years, I knew that this was just wrong and I had to find some way to rectify this tragedy.

Note: I have nothing against Ippudo, but to say it's the best ramen in Japan is like saying that Chipotle has the best burritos in San Francisco.

The Logo

Defining the Brand

The first step after picking the name was deciding on the logo for the new website. I knew that since the name was a bit silly, I wanted to have a more sophisticated looking logo for the project. I played with a few serif fonts and made adjustments to the kerning until I found something that I liked.

A huge inspiration during this time came through by looking at established companies within the culinary sector such as Bon Apetit.

The final logo that we decided to use for the website.

Creating the Website

Utilizing WordPress

This project was going to be designed using WordPress for the ease of use in updating new articles. Because of the limitations of the CMS, I decided to not make an initial design using Sketch. I started with a general idea of how I wanted the final website to look and experimented on the platform to find the best design for my project.

The one thing that I wanted to do was use Astra, because I knew from my teammate that it was optimized for SEO and worked well for another travel website that they were creating for general tourists in Tokyo.

Creating the Mobile App

Designing a Noodle App

After finishing the WordPress website, I decided that I wanted to create a mobile application to help our users. The idea behind a specific noodle application took some time to brainstorm.

I first looked at competitors such as Ramen Beast to see how they organized their application and after seeing how unintuitive many other applications were in this sector I decided to strip down my application into the barebone essentials.

The mobile app is designed for people who want to eat something good while they are in Japan, but might not know what is available. The main feature of the application is the noodle decider function that pulls a random restaurant from our database to suggest recommendations to the app user.

The app is not yet complete, but I will be handing off the prototypes to a developer soon to start development and hopefully the application will be ready for release by summer of 2020.