Jing-A aims to make beer that pushes the envelope, celebrates its Beijing roots, and changes perceptions of Chinese brewing worldwide. In 2021 Jing-A worked with Maples Design to redesign their website as part of a new brand and marketing strategy. The newly-designed site serves as a resource to help patrons select a beer, book reservations, and even order take-out or home deliveries.
Project
Jing-A
Design with the basics
The first step to any website design project is to define a base theme, including fonts, colors, and styles. Maples Design worked from Jing-A’s beautiful new branding guideline to ensure consistency across print and digital media. With a nod to the handmade quality of craft beer, a traditional newsprint style grid and font was central for the entire site. The typewriter-esque font Lekton as the body text, paired with the bold Khand font for headings, created the perfect balance as readers browse the site. Sunday Morning, a lighthearted and decorative font, is used as an accent and often seen in orange, one of Jing-A’s secondary colors.
Along with orange, you can find accents of yellow to offset the clean primary colors of black and white. While designing the early mock-ups, we quickly realized that using Jing-A’s powerful imagery was going to play an important role in the look and feel of the new site.
Building on bold Jing-A visuals
More than just a brewery, Jing-A’s influence has reached beyond the restaurant and nightlife of the city, becoming a part of what it means to live and work in Beijing. T-shirts, stickers, and pint glasses sporting the Jing-A logo are just some of their merchandise seen around the city. With such a strong identity, it is no wonder the imagery in the brewery’s branding arsenal is top-notch. Playing with gradients and text overlays, Maples Design leaned heavily on imagery as a key design feature of the new website to highlight the brand and cultural feeling that defines Jing-A.
Expanding beyond the beer
Meituan, Weidian, Jingdong, and Taobao are just some of the ways food, beer, and other products can be purchased in China. Having a website that connects out to all your online shops provides a smooth transition for users who prefer to order in that way. Maples Design worked with Jing-A to find a simple yet effective way for users to access these third-party apps. Through QR codes, users are able to easily navigate from the Jing-A website into the app of their choice and make a purchase. Still, there is no substitute for enjoying a craft beer on tap…
Returning to the main goals
One of the key goals for the new website was to act as a tool for customers in the brewery to get more information about the available beers. To declutter their beer menu, they decided to move much of the beer information from to their website and provide a user-friendly experience for visitors to finding that next beer they are hoping to try.
To accomplish this, Maples Design designed a robust beer search and filtering system, allowing visitors to filter by taste, style, category, and availability. With strong visuals and a clean interface for presenting information, users are able to easily narrow down their search and find the beer they are looking for. Whether they are sitting in the taphouse about to order or at home planning on which beers to stock up on, the newly built site provides a user-friendly experience to find and learn about Jing-A’s vast beer selection.
A Beijing beer icon
With the new website, the Jing-A marketing team has another tool to take on new projects and ideas to grow their brand. A fast, secure, and functional site gives patrons of Jing-A a starting point to learn more about the beers, locations, and what Jing-A has planned next!
This project was mentioned on DesignRush for Best Chinese Web Designs, check out this link to see more!
Maples Design was great at managing our concerns and their China-based experience was essential in giving us a platform to reach our global Jing-A fans.
Becky Lane, Marketing Manager