01
Respect the system in place
Aspect built a sound platform. We treated their type ramp, palette and visual motifs as the brand's — not ours — and worked inside them.
Case study · 2024 — ongoing
Continuing
the story.
MIKO's website was already live — quietly premium, grounded, honest — when they came to us. The brief wasn't to relaunch. It was to step in where another team left off and keep the site moving forward: smoother navigation, clearer product pages, room for new harvests, and the kind of steady design + development care a brand of this character actually needs.
Client
MIKO Distillery · Serbia
Category
Premium rakija — quince & plum
Engagement
Ongoing design + dev support
Live at
miko.rs
01 · The brief
A quiet partnership, not a restart.
MIKO came to us with a site they liked. The visual platform — soft sandstone backgrounds, deep forest green type, the diamond-cut Čista label motif, the slow editorial pace — had been built by Aspect Communications, and it already carried the brand's quiet strength. What was missing was a partner to keep stewarding it: refining what was friction, adding what was missing, holding the rhythm steady as new seasonal editions, new sections, and new content kept arriving.
So we stepped in the same way MIKO walks their own orchards. Patiently. We learned the existing system first — what worked, what caused friction, where the storytelling could breathe more — and then made small, considered moves: a smoother navigation, clearer product layouts that let the bottle photography lead, refined spacing and typography, room for content that would grow with the harvest. No grand relaunch. A continuation.
“A good website doesn't always begin with a blank canvas. Sometimes, the best work is in helping something good become even better.”
Continuation
02 · Approach
Designing within what already exists.
02
Let the photography lead
On product pages, every refinement gives the bottle and label artwork more room. Fewer competing elements, more silence around the hero.
03
Small moves, compound effect
A spacing pass here. A type-scale fix there. Each update modest on its own — together, a more cohesive, confident experience.
04
Care, not churn
Ongoing design and dev support: new sections when seasonal editions arrive, performance work, layout refinements as the catalogue grows.
03 · What we contribute
Six recurring areas — refined, extended, kept in steady hands.
01
Navigation refinement
Cleaned up wayfinding across the site — clearer link hierarchy, calmer header, language toggle parked where it belongs.
02
Product page layouts
Adjusted hero composition, gallery balance and “MIKO sugestija” pairing block so the bottle photography reads as the lead, not a thumbnail.
03
Čista landing experience
New collection landing for the Čista rakija family — a three-up product display on the forest-green plate, with intro copy and a routing CTA into each product.
04
Seasonal edition sections
Modular content blocks that drop into existing templates so new harvests, vintages and limited runs land without a new layout.
05
Typography + spacing pass
Refined the existing type ramp — same families, more confident sizes and rhythm — and rationalised vertical spacing across the long-form templates.
06
Performance + tech support
Image pipeline tightened, fonts subset, layout shifts removed; ongoing development availability for whatever the editorial calendar needs next.
04 · Palette
A palette borrowed from the orchard, the cellar and the bottle.
We didn't invent these colours — we inherited them. Deep forest green is the brand's voice colour, used for type and the footer plate. Warm sandstone (the colour of the linen the bottles are photographed on) carries every body section. Antique gold sits on the Čista labels, and a quiet ink does the long reading.
Forest Green#1F4734
Deep Forest#173526
Sandstone#EFE1CC
Linen#F7ECDA
Antique Gold#B68A4A
Ink#1F2A23
05 · Type
A serif that reads like a label engraving, a sans that disappears behind it.
The display face is Cormorant Garamond — graceful, with the slow Italian-renaissance pace MIKO's storytelling asks for. Body sits in Manrope, set at 17–18 px for long reading. Section openers (“MIKO SUGESTIJA”, “ČISTA · PRIRODA”) use a tight, all-caps sans at heavy weight to mark the rhythm without raising the volume.
Display · Cormorant Garamond
Čista
rakija od dunje
Body · Manrope
Čista esencija plodova 100% leskovačke dunje sa našeg imanja, stvorena od najfinijeg dela destilata.
Section opener · Manrope 800
MIKO · SUGESTIJA
06 · The estate
The brand is built on a real place.
Most of what we do on the website is, in the end, about staying out of the way of these two photographs: the cellar and the orchard. Everything we touch — spacing, type, layout — is in service of letting the photography of the estate carry the brand the way it should.
Their philosophy · our brief
Their philosophy is simple: keep things pure.
No artificial additives, no shortcuts — honest craft shaped by nature and time. We applied the same mindset to their website: no replatforms, no buzzword stacks, no novelty for novelty's sake. Just steady, considered design and development on top of work that already had something to say.
07 · Screens
The site, today.
These are screens currently live on miko.rs — three product pages from the Čista line and the collection landing for the family. The work we contribute sits inside them: layout, spacing, photography balance, the pairing modules, the routing strip that ties each page back to the rest of the catalogue.
Screen 01 · Product page
Čista · rakija od dunje (white)
Quince essence — 100% leskovačka varietal, the youngest of the family. Hero composition with the bottle floating against linen and a quince branch; three lifestyle stills underneath; MIKO sugestija pairing block on the right; routing strip to the rest of the line.
Screen 02 · Product page
Čista · rakija od dunje (odležala)
The same quince spirit, rested a year in French oak. The Sugestija module pivots to a two-bottle comparison still — the unaged and the aged side by side.
Screen 03 · Product page
Čista · rakija od šljive
Plum, autochthonous crvena ranka + lepotica varieties, five years in oak. Hero composition warmer, deeper colour temperature throughout — same template.
Screen 04 · Collection landing
Čista rakija — collection
The family page. A short intro sets the philosophy (“from fruit to bottle”), three bottles sit on the forest plate with the middle slot opening into a contextual still life. Each card routes into the product page above.
08 · Ongoing, not one-off
Each change moves the website a little closer to what the brand already is.
Sometimes that means a new section for a seasonal edition. Sometimes a performance tweak. Sometimes a layout refinement no visitor will ever consciously notice. Our cadence is steady design and development availability — there when MIKO needs us, invisible when they don't.
∞
engagement model
Open-ended monthly retainer. Design, frontend dev, consultation. No campaign-shaped end date.
4+
site sections shaped
Product pages, Čista landing, sustainability blocks, seasonal modules — refined or added without disturbing the template.
0
replatforms required
Same WordPress install, same CMS, same hands editing it. Every change ships into the existing stack.
2
languages, kept tidy
SRB + ENG. Every new module ships translatable on day one so the editorial team isn't blocked.
In closing
A small but meaningful transformation.
This wasn't a grand relaunch — it was a process of respect, for the work that came before, for the craft behind the brand, and for the visitors who experience it online. A continuation, not a reinvention, built on trust and steady growth.
Design refinement
Web design
Frontend development
WordPress support
Layout architecture
Performance
Ongoing consultation
Editorial sections
Services that made it happen
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