Work/Case study 02
Melbourne’s original laneway café
Jungle
Juice Bar
Centre Place, Melbourne · Café · Est. 1999
A hole-in-the-wall institution with more personality than most brands ever earn. The job was never to tidy it up — it was to get the laneway onto the screen.
Client
Jungle Juice BarScope
Design & build, four pages, menuStandout
Animated click-to-enter introStatus
Live · 2026Project overview
The café was
the brief.
Jungle Juice is tiny, tucked into Centre Place, and running since 1999 on coffee, bagels and fresh juice. Wooden stools, cut-down ping-pong tables, old golden storybooks used as menus, mismatched everything.
We took the interior as the source material, not a mood board. Deep greens, takeaway reds, aged paper. The site should feel like finding the place, not like reading about it.
It should feel
It should not feel
Minimalist luxury café. Corporate hospitality. Restaurant template.
The design concept
Melbourne laneway café meets tiny jungle bar meets vintage storybook.
Oversized type, flat blocks of colour, photography at full size and composition that sits a little off the grid on purpose — an extension of the room rather than a brochure for it.
Three colours,
taken from the room.
Dark green, takeaway red and aged cream. No white, no fourth colour, no gradients — the combination is what makes it read as analogue.
Primary. From the green surfaces and plants inside. Backgrounds, navigation, headings, large fields.
Accent. From old takeaway signage. Buttons, prices, links, small graphic marks.
Warm neutral. Aged paper and storybook menus — used instead of stark white so the screen feels tactile.
Typography
Type as signage.
Bold, condensed, a little retro — never elegant, never corporate. Set large enough that the words function as painted signs rather than headings.
Specimens below are set in visual stand-ins. Send the two family names from the live build and they’ll be swapped in and named here.
Display — heavy condensed grotesque (specimen set in a stand-in)
Uppercase only · tight leading · full stops kept
Great bagels.
No fuss.
Accent — monoline handwritten italic (stand-in)
A little hole in the wall
One line at a time, always alongside the display type — the human voice under the signage. Never used for body copy.
Navigation — numbered labels
Small red numerals in front of each item, with a red rule under the active one — borrowed from a printed menu, not a web nav.
UX approach
A door before the site.
The experience opens on a small branded entry moment you click through — a little sense of discovery, the way you find Jungle Juice tucked into Centre Place. Once inside, it gets deliberately plain, because the real need is simple.
Jungle Juice — 2026The key decision
Not over-designing the café.
Jungle Juice already had an identity. The work wasn’t to replace it with a polished digital brand system — it was to notice what was already there (the green, the red, the storybook menus, the ping-pong tables, the laneway) and translate it faithfully.
That’s what makes the site specific to Jungle Juice rather than something that could belong to any café. We didn’t build a café website — we put a very particular Melbourne place on screen.
Want one with this much character?
achiwebdesign@gmail.com · 0423 626 037