The Regal Oriental is a lavish fine-dining restaurant situated at the heart of the Royal Pavilion - a spectacular seaside pleasure palace. With its exotic architecture that blends Indian and Chinese aesthetics with Regency grandeur, it offers the perfect backdrop to an extravagant oriental-fusion gastronomic experience brought by Michelin-starred chefs.

This extravagant exotic backdrop where east meets west is the focus of the brand. The identity explores the striking visual contrast between the building’s plain exterior and vibrant interior while maintaining a refined, elegant personality.

To reflect the "East Meets West" concept, the word mark features an elegant typeface with a compass pointing east & west as the letter "o" uniting the two words.

I decided to use colours from each of the rooms within the Royal Pavilion and its exterior to form my colour palette. In order to further enhance the contrast between the structure's exterior and interior, I extracted numerous elegant yet striking patterns found throughout the palace and combined them with my colour palette to create a set of graphic elements to use throughout the project. These elements were used to fill the word mark and pictorial mark to emphasize the contrast between the building's plain exterior and vibrant interior.

I also used frames found within the building to use as frames within my design to create a clean visual contrast and balance between the patterns and type. 

I used the vibrant patterns and frames to redesign the menu where each spread has a differnt pattern and the frames contain the menu content. I also used the frames for the invitation cards used by fine dining restaurants where the front is plain white with only the logo on it and the inside holds a subtle elegant iteration of the patterns with the frame. 

When looking at fine dining restaurant websites, I found that they keep a minimal and clean UI with lots of photography and downloadable menus. Therefore, I created a no-scroll website with a minimalsit UI and numerous photographs. I used the frames I created to ensure a structured layout. In retrospect, the use of frames also recreated the building’s column pattern in negative space. The navbar is divided with the logo in the centre to keep with the theme of east and west. The pages in the navbar are also categorized by east and west. The two pages on the left are related to the food at the restaurant. The two pages on the right are to provide information on the building and the restaurant. 

As fine dining restaurants tend to use more imagery than type on social media platforms to attract audiences, I decided to incorporate the brand identity into the presentation of the photography. In the first post, I used the "O" from the wordmark with patterns to create a clear, elegant mask for the photography. The second post promotes a visiting celebrity fusion cuisine chef.