Kittch
Leading the digital transition for chefs and culinary creators.
Brand concepts/identity, product design
Overview
Kittch is a live streaming platform for culinary creators and food enthusiasts. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants and chefs had to adapt to new ways of doing business and Kittch was made to fill that gap. My colleagues and I at Studio Rodrigo were brought on to lead all facets of design for the initial launch – from establishing the brand identity to crafting the product and fine-tuning the UX and UI.
I created and pitched intial brand directions, created the reaction emojis, and worked on parts of the site UI including the home page, chef profiles, recipes, and iterated on the streaming experience.
Part 1: The Kittch Brand
We were tasked with creating an identity that felt fresh, energetic, and lively. Working with the Kittch team, we agreed on themes of hospitality, care, and the energy of cooking and creation. The brand should also feel approachable, as if you’d want to sit at the kitchen counter and converse with your favorite chef.
Final Brand
Our final brand concept landed on a hand-drawn heart in a flame for the final logomark, and also brought in playful elements such as the illustrated clams from the previous visual concept that I had worked on. I then extended to the emojis and which set the style for other illustrated moments within the platform.
Sketching & Approach
Our approach channeled the energy and passion in the kitchen into a Kittch flame logo. We also incorporated playful elements through the illustrated reaction emojis and clams, which is Kittch’s virtual currency for tipping and supporting creators on the platform.
Working on the initial brand concepts was a chance for me to create visuals that were more energetic and bold, as my own tendencies are usually lighter and softer. I proposed a direction focused on ephemera of restaurants and food, including remnants of sauce on a plate, price tag shapes, and neon. Overall I wanted this direction to feel bold, bright, and cinematic.
For another brand concept, I collaborated with a freelancer who was also part of the project. While he created the foundations of type usage, color, and initial illustrations, I extended those further by applying them to the web, drawing more illustrations/shapes, and creating a secondary logo in the shape of a flame. In later refinements, I sketched out more variations of the flame mark which then transformed into a mark combining both the heart and flame.
Part 2: The Kittch Platform
Our overall goal was to create a digital platform allowing culinary creators to amplify what they do in a sustainable way, all the while sharing their craft and teaching others who are just as enthusiastic and hungry for quality food content. Our approach involved four objectives:
- How do we organize the various content types and make sure they’re visually distinct and easy to find?
- How might we create a robust and interactive streaming experience between
a culinary creator and their viewers?
- How do we also bring in elements of the real world dining into a digital experience?
- How might we create space for a chef or culinary creator to share their story, and also share relevant content?
Information Architecture
A major part of the project was figuring out how to organize the content that would be available on the platform. Through various iterations and different visual styles, I worked on the content UI of the home page and making sure each content type looked distinct. While working I thought about:
- Distinguishing between the top featured stream event vs. the streams below
- Designing featured streams to follow a familiar pattern of thumbnail and title for users to easily identify
- Creating a card style for upcoming events along with an associated action
- Featuring chefs prominently with large imagery for the Channels section
We designed Kittch to be a robust, feature-rich product, and thoughtfully developed various details including:
- A streaming experience mirroring elements a restaurant experience via audience interaction through a “chef’s table” within the stream, along with asynchronous communication through an Ask a Chef feature. Viewers can also react live via custom Kittch emojis.
- Real world interactions such as tipping, which viewers can do with the in-platform currency of clams.
- A channel and profile page with ample emphasis on chefs to tell their background and story, plus an accessible archive of past streams and recipes.
Launch and Results
Kittch successfully launched in March 2022 and was featured in FastCompany, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times with positive reviews. Since launch, Kittch has raised a first-seed funding round of $5 million, and is actively growing with over 500 chefs creating profiles on the platform. Kittch was also named as one of FastCompany’s 10 Most Innovative Companies in Media for 2023.
Takeaways
With this project I was able to collaborate on creating a brand identity from scratch, and use certain elements or ideas to iteratively work towards a final brand. On the product side, I was involved with crafting the UI and UX for a live-streaming platform, focused on audience interactions, asynchronous communication, live events, featuring recipes and highlighting chefs, all through a food and creator-focused lens.
Team
Studio Rodrigo
Studio Lead – Ritik Dholakia
Project Manager – V Pan
Design – Nick Emrich, Beckie Choe, Connie Chu, Shane Zucker
Kittch
Co-founder, CEO – Brian Bedol
Co-founder, CRO – Doug Deluca
Co-founder, COO – Elana Karp
Chief Product Officer – Kalpana Berman
Project Manager – Andrea DeFrancis
Masters of Code (Dev)
Project Manager – Dima Lukhanin
Developer – Vladyslav Yashchuk