Fired Up Kitchen is a mobile wood fire oven that cooks up truly delicious, locally sourced pizzas and other foods for private parties, festivals and special events. Because the oven is on wheels, Chef/Owner Gino Gabriel can take Fired Up Kitchen pretty much anywhere, from your back yard to Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. Gino is a damn fine chef, so I leapt at the opportunity to give his website and overall look an update.

Redesign Priority No. 1: Focus on the Food

Gino Gabriel is a well-trained chef. He went to New England Culinary Institute, which is also where Food Network mainstay Alton Brown graduated, and the Italian Culinary Institute. He knows his food, and the previous website just didn’t seem to focus on the food as much as I thought it should.

 

We agreed that this site was missing a focal point, and that focal point really should be a nice, hot pizza coming out of the oven. I went BIG. Moved the navigation to the side, kept a slender column for copy and a small photo gallery, and they popped a big picture of a pizza in the background. In the foreground, you can see the bubbling of the cheese, the browning of the crust and the brightness of those tomatoes. Meanwhile, behind that pizza is the 800 degree wood fire in the oven. That wood fire is what gives the pizza it’s unique flavor. That wood fire is part of the Unique Selling Proposition for Fired Up Kitchen: this is not pizza that is sitting under a warming lamp: each pie is assembled and cooked to order, right in front of you.

Redesign Priority No. 2: Develop a new color palette

Gino wanted something that better represented the fire and the intensity of the oven. Something stronger, more durable. The orange and tan just wasn’t putting forth the oomph he wanted. I shifted the palette darker yet warmer, to maroon with gold for items of attention. That meshed well with the dark, cavernous feel of the oven, which allowed the fire and colorful vegetables on the pizzas to pop.

 

Redesign Priority No. 3: Create a functional calendar

The old calendar was just a straight html document. If you wanted to update it, you had to go in manually. I wanted to avoid a situation where I wasn’t available to make those changes, so I found Full Calendar, a jQuery calendar that integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar. That way, either Gino or myself can make updates to the calendar on the fly, anywhere we have internet access. It’s all managed and shared through Google accounts. I took a few minutes to style it to fit in, and it works like a charm.

 

Redesign Priority No. 4: Make it easier to get in touch with Gino

As you can see on the old Fired Up Kitchen website, the page for booking events only had a phone number. With Fired Up Kitchen out on the road all the time, that’s a recipe for disaster. By plugging in a simple contact form, people who are looking to hire Gino can send him a message with contact information and their preferred response method, either email or phone. That way, it’s all right there in his email box for easy reference and response.

 

Special Bonus: Redesigned Twitter Page and New Business Cards!

Now that @firedupkitchen is up and running on Twitter, I designed a custom background that ties in with the look and feel of the new Fired Up Kitchen website. Nothing too crazy, and I didn’t put the pizza in the background because it’s way too distracting when Twitter resizes to fit monitors. I went with a wood grain texture instead, tinted to that dark, warm red that we like. I also added a picture of Gino hard at work and the classic Margherita, which is on the menu at pretty much every event.

Redesign: Fired Up Kitchen on Twitter

@firedupkitchen updated and tweeting!

Also, heading into SXSW, where Fired Up Kitchen was serving food at the free Auditorium Shores concert series, Gino let me know he was running dangerously low on business cards. We only had a matter of days, but we came up with a more rustic card that actually has his name on it (the old card didn’t). Wood and the new color scheme again leading the way.

What’s next?

Well, things are getting into full swing right now, but we are working on some concepts for t-shirts, and some QR codes to put customers at festival in touch with Fired Up Kitchen’s social media channels. In the meantime, if you have a private party or catering event, give Gino Gabriel at Fired up Kitchen a shout!