Kittiewake Studio — Journal

One colour is usually enough

2026-10-08T09:00:00Z

When a small shop first thinks about colour, the instinct is to gather a lot of it — a bright primary, a contrasting secondary, an accent for the accent. It feels generous and fun. It almost always ends up looking cheaper, because a scatter of colours is exactly what the cheapest printing and the busiest high streets already look like. Restraint reads, to most eyes, as care.

One colour, and the room around it

Our usual starting point for a small brand is a single colour used with conviction, on a carefully chosen neutral — a warm off-white, a soft grey, a deep near-black. The colour does the signalling; the neutral gives it room to be seen. One well-chosen colour on a good background looks considered. The same colour fighting three others for attention looks like a sale rack.

A single colour is also practical in ways that matter to a small maker. It prints cheaply — one ink, one pass, fewer things to go wrong, no proof round to chase a second colour the machine can't hold next to the first. It is easy to match across a sign, a bag and a website, so the shop looks like one shop everywhere. And it is easy for the owner to stay inside: there is one colour, and everything else is the neutral.

Colour is loudest when there is less of it. One confident colour says more than five timid ones.

When a second colour earns its place

Sometimes one colour genuinely is not enough, and a second earns its keep — most often when colour has a job to do beyond decoration. A coffee roaster who sorts bags by roast, a tea shop that groups the shelf by type: there, a small set of colours is a system, each one carrying meaning, and that is a different thing from decoration. The test is whether the second colour is doing work. If it is only there to look more colourful, it is usually making the brand look like less.

So before adding a colour, we ask what it is for. If the answer is a reason — this colour means decaf, this one means the poetry shelf — it stays. If the answer is only that the palette felt a bit bare, it goes, and the brand is quietly better for the space.

Choosing a typeface you can live with

2026-10-03T09:00:00Z

Choosing type is the part of a brand people most want to get adventurous with, and the part where adventure costs the most later. A display face with real personality can carry a logo beautifully and then let you down everywhere else — in a long paragraph, at small sizes, in the plain email you send a supplier on a Tuesday.

Two jobs, often two faces

We usually split the work. One face for display — the name over the door, the headings, the moments that set the tone — where character matters and there are only a few words to set. Another for text — menus, labels, the website, anything long or small — where the only virtue that counts is that it is easy and quick to read. The display face can be distinctive. The text face should be nearly invisible; you should notice the words, not the letters.

Test it where it will work hardest

A typeface that looks elegant in a big heading on a bright screen is not the test. Set your actual prices in it — lots of figures, lined up. Set a phone number, an address, an allergen line. Set it small, and set it on the warm off-white or dark background you will really use, not on pure white. A lot of faces that charm you at forty pixels become hard work at fourteen, and some have figures so quirky that a price list turns into a puzzle.

A text face earns its place not in the logo but in the hundredth menu line nobody was meant to admire.

Fewer weights, chosen on purpose

A small brand does not need nine weights. It needs a regular for reading, a bold for when something must stand out, and the discipline to stop there. Every extra option is one more decision to make, consistently, forever — and inconsistency is what makes a small brand look homemade. Two weights used the same way every time will always look more considered than six used however the day went.

For most of the shops we work with, the quietly right answer is a good, familiar face for text and one characterful face reserved for the name. It is not the choice that excites a designer in the first meeting. It is the one the owner is still glad of a year later, when the novelty of anything louder would have long worn thin.

Labels that survive the fridge

2026-09-29T09:00:00Z

Packaging is where a lot of lovely design quietly falls apart. A label is not a picture on a screen; it is ink on a real material that will be handled, chilled, warmed, wiped and left in a window. We have seen a beautiful jam label curl off its jar in a week because nobody asked where the jar would live.

The place decides the paper

A label for a chiller needs an adhesive and a stock made for cold and damp; an ordinary paper label will lift at the corner the first humid day. A label that sits in a sunny window will fade, and some inks fade faster than others — a bright pink can be noticeably paler by spring. A bottle that goes in an ice bucket needs a stock that does not go soft and grey when it is wet. Ask where the thing lives before you choose how it is printed.

Design for the cheap print run

Most small makers print short runs on modest machines, and that is worth designing for rather than against. Fine hairlines can break up; very small text can fill in and turn muddy; a pale tint can band instead of printing smooth. A mark built from solid shapes and one or two flat colours will print cleanly on almost anything, from a good press to the roll printer in the back of a shop. It will also cost less, because you are not paying for a proof round to chase a colour the machine was never going to hit.

Design the label the printer you actually have can print well, not the one a perfect press could.

Leave room for the law and the hand

Food labels carry things that are not up to taste: ingredients, weight, an allergen line, a date. Plan the space for them from the start, in a size someone can genuinely read, rather than squeezing them in at the end in grey four-point type. And leave a margin — a place for a thumb, a little air around the edge — so a label trimmed slightly off on a busy day still looks deliberate.

The test is simple and physical. Print the label, stick it on the real jar or bag, put it where it will be sold, handle it, chill it if it will be chilled, and look at it after a week. The label that still looks like itself after that is the one worth keeping.

Designing a menu people can actually read

2026-09-22T09:00:00Z

A café menu is one of the hardest small things to design well, because it is almost never read the way it is designed. You lay it out sitting down, on a bright screen, with all the time in the world. It is read standing at a counter, in a queue, in the warm gloom of a room full of people, by someone deciding in four seconds between a flat white and a cortado.

Fewer things, clearly grouped

The first fix is usually to cut. A menu with forty items is not generous; it is a wall. People read the top few lines, feel the effort, and order what they always order. We group things the way a person thinks — coffee, then not-coffee, then food — and we keep each group short enough to take in at a glance. If something sells once a month, it can live on a little card by the till rather than on the main board.

Price is part of the reading

Dotted leaders that run from each item to its price, all lining up on the right, look tidy on paper and read badly in a hurry — the eye has to travel the whole line. We prefer the price set close to the name, in a quieter weight, so you take in the thing and its cost as one piece of information. Nobody should have to measure across the board with a finger.

Light, distance and ink

Test the menu where it will live. Print it, pin it up at the height it will hang, stand where the customer stands and read it in the actual light of the room. Type that looked refined at arm's length on a screen can vanish on a dim wall three metres away. Usually the answer is simple: fewer words, a touch more size, and more space around each line so it has room to breathe.

A board that updates — a bakery's bakes of the week, a kitchen's specials — should be built so the owner can change it in a minute without the design falling apart. We leave a fixed frame and a clear slot for the changing part, so Tuesday's board looks like Monday's even though the words moved.

A good menu is not the one that looks best in a photograph. It is the one a stranger reads correctly, once, without trying.

None of this is about making a menu plain. A menu can have a strong character — a warm paper, a confident name at the top, a mark you remember. It just has to do its first job first: tell a hungry person what they can have, and what it costs, before they reach the front of the queue.

Why a small site should load fast

2026-09-15T09:00:00Z

Most of the sites we build are one to four pages: who you are, what you sell, where to find you. Nobody scrolls a bakery site for twenty minutes. So the single thing that matters most is not how clever the site is — it is whether it opens before the person on a phone, on a slow connection, outside your shop, gives up and puts the phone away.

That moment is shorter than people think. A few seconds of a blank screen and a hungry customer has already decided you are closed. The good news is that a small business site is the easiest kind of site to make genuinely fast, because almost everything that makes sites slow is weight you do not need.

Where the weight comes from

Three things, in our experience, account for nearly all of it. First, images that are far larger than the space they fill — a photo exported at 4000 pixels wide to sit in a 600-pixel column. Second, fonts loaded from elsewhere, which hold the text blank until they arrive. Third, scripts for things the site does not actually do: a chat bubble nobody answers, a cookie banner for tracking you never wanted, a slider with one slide.

Strip those and a four-page site can weigh less than a single ordinary photograph. It will open the instant it is asked to, and it will keep opening on the day your menu goes round the neighbourhood and a hundred people look at once.

What we do instead

We size every image to the space it fills and no larger, and we draw simple things — a mark, a pattern, an opening-hours card — as flat graphics that stay crisp at any size and cost almost nothing to load. We use the fonts already on the reader's phone; there are good ones, and nobody has ever complained that a menu looked wrong because the typeface was familiar.

And we leave things out. A small shop does not need an account system or a live feed. It needs an address, a photo or two, a price list and a way to reach you. Build only that, build it plainly, and the site is fast for free — not because it was tuned, but because there was never anything heavy to begin with.

Speed on a small site is mostly subtraction. You do not make it fast; you avoid making it slow.

There is a quieter benefit, too. A site with nothing borrowed from elsewhere keeps working. There is no distant piece that can go down and take your opening hours with it. For a shop whose website exists mainly so someone can check you are open on a Sunday, that reliability is worth more than any feature you could add.