Concept project — self-initiated
A sourdough bakery on Kazimierz that opens at five and sells out by noon. The brief we set ourselves: design for a business whose scarcity is the selling point.
The problem
Most bakery websites are built to sell everything to everyone: full catalogue, delivery radius, gift boxes. Ziarno's actual position is the opposite. Six loaves a day, baked once, gone by noon. The queue forms at seven because supply is genuinely limited.
Designing abundance into that site would have been a lie the customer discovers at the counter. The task was to make scarcity feel like intent rather than a shortcoming.
The decision
We wrote the hours into the identity rather than burying them in a footer. "Wypiekamy do południa — albo do końca kolejki" (we bake until noon, or until the queue ends) sits in the opening view. It sets the expectation before a visitor decides to walk over.
The palette came from the product: browned butter, deep crust, a bordeaux drawn from the shop's awning. Nothing in it was chosen from a swatch library — every value is sampled from bread or the room it is sold in.
The craft
The type pairs a display serif with a hand-lettered script used exactly twice, so it reads as the baker's own note rather than decoration. The gallery is captioned with times — 5:14 in the morning, Saturday 7:14 — which quietly reinforces the daily rhythm the business runs on.
Everything is one page. A bakery with six products does not need six pages, and pretending otherwise is how small businesses end up maintaining sites they never update.
Every brief has one true constraint worth designing around. Finding it is the first conversation.
