Case study · Beach club · Bookings
Sixty summers, one notebook.
Lido is a Riccione beach club, family-run since 1962: 78 umbrellas, 44 striped cabins, a seafood kitchen that buys the fish at six in the morning. I designed the identity and built the website, and the whole project has one goal, move the old booking notebook online without losing what made it charming.
01 · The brief
The scenario: a beach club run by the same family since 1962. The place is loved, the kitchen is serious, but the identity is a collage of signs redone over the decades, and the "online presence" is a phone that rings while the owner is at the fish market. Bookings still live in a paper notebook, one name per umbrella.
The brief I gave myself: an identity that feels like the riviera without fake nostalgia, and a website that does the notebook's job better, letting people pick their own umbrella online, exactly as they used to do in person, without erasing sixty years of history. One system, three services on the beach: umbrellas, cabins, kitchen.
A serif in a swimsuit
The strategy in one line: Lido is not a new venue faking history, it is a true history that deserves a uniform. Every choice starts from the beach that already exists.
Strategy, and the road not taken
First direction explored: the "modern" beach club, geometric sans, saturated photos, sunset gradient. It works on Instagram for one season, then ages badly, and above all it erases the sixty years of history, the one thing competitors cannot copy.
The chosen direction: vintage hotel-signage elegance. Italiana, an all-caps serif tracked very wide, for a sixties-signage feel without imitating any specific one. Instrument Sans for hours, prices and bookings. Colors taken from the beach itself, the bordeaux of the awnings, the blue of the sea, the sand, the linen white, and the wood of the walkways. The awning's white-and-blue stripe, repeated as a border, replaces any icon. The uniform.
The identity system
The wordmark under the awning stripe: Italiana, all caps, tracked at 28%. Sixties hotel-signage energy, no imitation.
Typography and motif: the serif speaks, the sans serves, the white-and-blue stripe signs. No logo icon needed.
Five colors, all from the actual beach: the awning bordeaux, the sea blue that carries every accent, the sand, the linen white, and the wood of the walkways. No 12-shade palette nobody will use.
The website, page by page
Every screen is born twice: first as a wireframe, while changing it is cheap, then as design in the brand mood. Here they are side by side.
Page 01 · The hero
Wireframe · before
Design · after
The decision: the hero answers a visitor's three questions in three seconds, what it is, when it is open, how to book. The white-and-blue awning stripe opens the page like the edge of a parasol, and the two CTAs, book an umbrella or read the menu, are the only two things anyone came for.
Page 02 · The booking, like the notebook
Wireframe · before
Design · after
Scegli il posto
First the zone, then the umbrella. Crossed ones are already taken, just like a name in the notebook.
The decision: this is not a form, it is the notebook, on a screen. Every umbrella is drawn as a parasol seen from above, in segments, and the color states the zone: bordeaux for the sea front, blue for mid beach, wood for the back. The sea sits at the top of the map and the walkways at the bottom, so you orient yourself as you would on the actual sand. Six rows, A to F, price tied to the row and visible while you choose. The flow is four honest steps, when, where, extras, details, with the running total always open alongside.
Page 03 · La carta
Wireframe · before
Design · after
La carta
Filter by need. Dishes that do not match do not vanish, they dim, so you see what is there and why it is not for you.
The decision: the menu is a filterable, structured document, not a scanned PDF. Choose "senza glutine" and the dishes with gluten dim rather than disappear, allergens are listed per dish, and the crudo del giorno has no printed price because it depends on the six-a.m. market. Honest by design, and readable dish by dish by search engines and AI assistants.
Three things, done well
The live site does not pretend to be a resort. It says exactly what Lido is, the beach, the kitchen, the cabins, and what each costs.
The whole offer, on one page
✦ AI Ready, applied
Found by people who ask, not just people who search.
What does an AI assistant answer to "beach club with a seafood kitchen near Riccione"? It depends on what it can read. For Lido: BeachResort and Restaurant structured data with hours, season and location; the menu marked up with Menu schema, dish by dish, allergens included; the umbrella zones and prices as Offers; answer-first content (where, when, how much, can I bring the dog). The same checklist as every Coodie build.
06 · A concept, built for real
Demonstration brand. Real, working booking.
Lido is a concept I designed and built end to end, and I say so, everywhere. I prefer a declared demonstration to a portfolio inflated with clients that never existed. But the build is real: you can open it, pick an umbrella on the map, and read today's menu with its filters. Everything you just read, the strategy, the rejected direction, the booking-as-notebook, the filterable menu, the AI Ready data, is exactly the path of a real engagement. With a real client only one thing changes: the name over the door.