Today’s post highlights the design of Pizzaza.ca, the home page of a local restaurant and wine bar. While home pages for most restaurants choose to use warm saturated colors and vibrant close-up photographs of signature dishes, this site uses a desaturated sepia full-bleed snapshot of a young lady writing the menu on a chalk whiteboard. This scene effectively creates an atmosphere of a warm, ambient, non-corporate and relaxed environment which is further illustrated by the picture gallery. A translucent dark strip extends across the top part of the screen and hosts stippled icons leading to the wine selection, menu entries and other sections; note how the icon style is connected to the chalk whiteboard in the background photo.

Full-bleed background pictures are used on other pages, such as wine selection or employment, but the charming simplicity of the home page is lost in rather garish floating rectangular boxes. Furthermore, these boxes feature completely unnecessary sliding animations that don’t add anything besides full view of the background.