← Back to casesBrand-Website Case · Food & Beverage
A menu that changes daily,
on a site that never needs rebuilding
Monsieur Long is an artisan gelato shop on Guide Street in Taipei's Dadaocheng, run by a French-trained pastry chef. Flavours are made fresh every day and change every day. The hard part isn't making the site look good — it's who maintains it afterwards. So we split flavours into two layers: illustrations, colour and copy stay in the design assets where they change a few times a year, while "what's in the case today" is something the shop ticks off on their phone. Save, and the ticker, the daily board and the flavour pages all update at once.
Daily
Shop updates flavours from a phone
16
Procedurally drawn flavour illustrations
0 files
All vector — no image bandwidth
2 forms
Collaborations · gift orders
How it works
They tick a few boxes; the site is already updated
An ice cream shop's content changes daily. If every change needs a developer, the site is stale within three months. So we separated what changes from what doesn't, and gave the shop only the half that changes — no technical background required.
1→
Tick before opening
Open the back office on a phone, check today's flavours, add a note like "sold out early today"
2→
Hit save
A plain form, nothing clever — one tap, and the site's cache is invalidated at the same time
3
Site updates instantly
Ticker, daily board and the "available today" tags all change together
Content architecture
Separating what changes from what doesn't
Design
Flavour catalogue
Illustration colours, tasting copy, motifs. Changes a few times a year — a design asset, versioned and deployed
↓
Operations
Today's board
Which flavours are out, ad-hoc new ones, one announcement line. Changes daily — lives in the database, owned by the shop
↓
Automatic
Derived state
Limited flavours retire themselves on their end date; new ones get a NEW badge automatically. No manual cleanup
Design & engineering
The brand's own visual language, made to move
A melting edge
Drips hang from the yellow ticker, breathing slowly and occasionally falling; on desktop they stretch toward your cursor. Taken from the shop's own Instagram graphic, drawn with bezier curves and animated with transforms only — smooth on phones too.
Type that fills up
On load, the second line of the wordmark fills with brand yellow from the bottom, overshoots slightly, then settles. An ink outline holds the letterforms so the words read at any fill level.
Procedural flavour art
16 flavours are not 16 image files — they're one component generating vector illustrations from a colour and a motif. Add a flavour, add a hex, the art follows.
Shared-element transitions
Tap a flavour card and that scoop morphs into the detail hero. Built on the browser's native View Transitions, so unsupported browsers simply don't animate.
Two forms, one inbox
Collaboration enquiries and gift/custom-cake orders share one API and one back office, so the shop only checks one place. Validated on both ends, with bot protection.
Hand-drawn store map
No embedded third-party map: it plants someone else's visuals mid-page and is restricted by our security policy anyway. We drew the Dadaocheng blocks instead; the button opens Google Maps directly.
Live opening status
Open now, closed today or already shut — computed in Taipei time. The Tuesday/Wednesday closure is written once and shared site-wide.
No invented food-safety data
Allergen, alcohol and vegan fields stay empty until the shop confirms each one; the site says "see in-store labelling". An automated test enforces it.
Performance & accessibility
Animation is transform and opacity only; Chinese uses a system font stack, saving half a megabyte of font CSS. Reduced-motion, keyboard navigation and skip-to-content all supported.
Why a brand website
What a food brand needs isn't pretty — it's alive
01
It doesn't go stale
For a shop whose menu changes daily, the real risk is abandonment. Hand maintenance back to the owner and the site stays alive.
02
It catches business
Collaborations, market invitations and corporate gifting all land in one back office — no scrolling through DMs.
03
It's worth remembering
The site has to feel like this shop at first glance. There's no shortcut for that; it can only grow out of the brand's own material.
Your brand deserves a site that won't go stale
Food, retail or any brand whose content changes constantly — we design maintenance in rather than leaving it to you. Start by seeing what we built for Monsieur Long.