A brand and website for a bottled milk tea startup. I designed the identity and the site, and built the front end.
Bare Brew came to me as a rough idea. The one thing the client really pushed for was ready-to-drink boba, a drink in the same family as Slate but with more of a lean toward traditional tea. Everything else was left to me.
Most bubble tea shops are bright and busy. I wanted Bare Brew to feel closer to a tea brand, so I kept the site plain and let the product photos carry it.
The interface only uses black, white and one light gray. The nav, buttons, headings and rules all stay in those, so on any page the only color is in the photos of the drinks.
That put a lot of weight on the photography. With nothing else on the page competing for attention, a weak product shot is obvious.
Product cards and images start with square corners. When the pointer moves over one, the corners round to 32 pixels, or 16 on the smaller carousel cards, over 0.3 seconds. They go back to square when it leaves.
Most of the site holds still, and this gives the products one small response to the pointer. Phones don't have hover, so they never see it. On a phone the scroll animations are the only motion.
The real product card from the site, with a placeholder photo. Hover over it, or tab to it.
The About section is a grid of four photos around a short block of text, showing tea leaves, tea steeping, the ingredients and a row of sealed bottles. When the section scrolls into view, each photo slides in from a different edge. Each slide takes two seconds and starts a quarter second after the one before, so the grid is done in under three.
That's slow for a website, and if you scroll quickly you'll get there before it's finished. I kept it slow anyway. The section is about how the tea is made, and I wanted it to take a moment to come together.
Brewed With Care, Sealed For You.
Libre Baskerville 700, for headings
Smooth and creamy traditional milk tea with perfectly chewy tapioca pearls.
Inter 400, for body text
Black
#000000, Interface
White
#FFFFFF, Interface
Gray 50
#F9FAFB, Ground
Tea amber
#84492D, Photography only
Redrawn in 2026 from the shipped site.
The site shipped in 2025 and was live for a while. The company has since closed. The link above goes to a copy of the site as I designed it, with placeholder photos and copy in place of the originals.
