In the heart of Oxford, 1855 is not your traditional wine bar. I helped them break ground with a fresh and innovative new website.
Popping the Cork
The brand-new 1855 is a modern wine bar and bistro in Oxford’s Castle Quarter, serving gourmet food and coffee alongside their more traditional tipple.
To show off their individuality, they wanted a site that would really impress potential customers, and show off their modern take on wine.
Collaborating again with Chris Page at Tait Design, we built a long single-page site, to present the 1855 experience as a story that their customers can’t wait to be a part of.
Taking them through the history of the 1855 classification before introducing them to the sommelier and chef, by the time the user reaches the contact information at the bottom their mouth is salivating at the thought of visiting.
Full-bodied & Flamboyant
The clean, rounded outlines of Brandon Grotesque Light are a great modern twist on traditional grotesque shapes, and they perfectly complement 1855’s modern take on the world’s oldest tipple.
Minion Pro Regular is a more classic serif, and the beautiful italic forms add a touch of elegance to the body copy on the site.
Headings
Brandon Grotesque Light
Body
Minion Pro Regular Italic
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The Finished Product
Website Design
What I Learned
content really is king
We got a bit ahead of ourselves with this project, and had the design almost finalised when the content requirements changed at the last minute. It took quite a bit of work to fit the new content into such a tightly constrained layout, but whilst working it in I made it a lot more flexible, so even though the layout is complicated, it can still grow as the content within it does.
Also, there are more breakpoints on this site than any other I’ve built, to allow the scrolling ‘windows’ to display correctly at all screen sizes, which was a challenge in itself.
Site no longer online.