Native App Development Final: Rustic Bagel Shop App
This project takes a look into creating an app that both serves a functional purpose for a small business as well as matching the branding from their stores and website.
As the final assignment for my Fall 2022 Native App Development course, I wanted to try my hand at a potential client-based app situation. Though I was not commissioned by Bagels Boys Cafe to make the app, I did grow up attending Boy Scouts meetings with the family that owns it, so I thought it would be an interesting company to use as my inspiration. My primary focus with this project was to make an app that mixed 90’s style branding with a modern feel.
In this endeavor, I ran into a few challenges. The first challenge I ran into was feeling that the app looked overly plain. As you can tell by the logo, the company’s branding has not evolved since its founding, which I find quite charming. For this app, however, I challenged myself with finding a way to adapt their logo and themes with an app that looks like it just came out. In the end, I decided to style the buttons of the app to mirror the logo (boxes with sharp edges and a tan-white gradient background) while also incorporating a playful tile background of assorted bagels and rounding the corners on the images in the carousel.
The image carousel was another thing I really wanted to include. When I was looking at the Bagel Boys website for ideas, I saw that they had a gallery of high quality images. I immediately knew that I wanted to incorporate them into the project. I had already put them in a list in the “View the Menu” section, but I felt like the images would shine on the front page as well. Especially when comparing to other restaurant apps, I thought that seeing the product would greatly help incentivize the customer to order from the store.
This project taught me a lot about client work and branding. As a marketing major with a digital marketing emphasis, much of my undergraduate degree has pertained to taking a company’s branding and trying to align company deliverables with it. This project took that theme to a whole new level, as instead of making a slide deck presentation with similar colors and fonts, I had to put any details I needed to include into the code itself. In the future, I would like to add a section with a meal-order service where customers could actually place orders. I learned a great deal in this class, and the world of app design is much less scary than I thought it was. I am looking forward to building on these skills as I continue in the Emerging Media program.
