Ina Garten is the much beloved author of the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks and host of Barefoot Contessa on Food Network. We had the pleasure of working with Ina and her team on the complete redesign of the Barefoot Contessa website.

Our aim was threefold: to bring the effortlessly delightful and heartwarming Barefoot Contessa brand experience to life online, translate Ina’s beautiful and thoughtfully considered approach to each step of our process, and increase engagement and conversion across the site as a whole. In order to do so, we needed to get to know her and her brand intimately: sharing meals, studying her cookbooks, and spending focused time together to understand her vision, goals, and audience.

We sought to create a refreshed digital hub for the brand that is warm, welcoming, and authentic, just like Ina, for two key audiences: young, aspiring cooks and long-established Ina enthusiasts. We defined two major tasks at the onset of the project: design a seamless experience that merged hardcover cookbooks, searchable cookbook indexes, and digital recipes, as well as create a new editorial strategy that pushed her traditional blog to a more structured distribution platform that highlighted the brand, voice, and topics of Ina’s world.

For the visual design of the site, we created an intuitive and modular UI (user interface) system with a lot of open white space and beautiful, easy-to-read text. Our main objective was to showcase her content without any unnecessary design elements or ornamentation.

Ina and the Barefoot Contessa brand are synonymous with quality, attention to detail, warmth, and care. Our hope was to create a site experience that embodied all of those qualities and most importantly was authentic and true to her.