Giant Ginkgo

I've been working on a couple of new websites recently, both of them for my lovely and hyper-active girlfriend who is going to write two parallel food blogs - one in English and the other in Japanese. For anybody who knows us, this shouldn't come as any sort of surprise - we are both quite obsessed with tasty food, and over the years many different people have suggested that we do something with our ever-expanding knowledge about good places to eat.

Nibble Kibble

We played around with a whole bunch of possible URLs, and this was the cutest one we came across that didn't have some sort of web-ish prefix added to it. "Nibble Kibble" was much more fun than "MyChicagoFoodBlog.com" or "EasyTastyChicagoFood.net."

I just finished putting together a design for the English language site, it features a cutting board theme, with ingredients and even a chef's knife (How can one resist putting a sharp knife on a web site?) to spice things up some. It is fun getting a chance to do a design without having to please some random committee of strangers who don't have a sense of humor or any sort of taste at all. Nibble Kibble is a bit over the top, let me know what you think!

Gochiso Sama

"Gochiso Sama" is a customary Japanese phrase that one says after eating a good meal, to express appreciation and gratitude for the food and the person that cooked it. My girlfriend wants to write a blog that will be read by Japanese people back home, who are interested in the 'alien' cuisine in Chicago. If you're trying to learn Japanese, it might be an interesting experience seeing how she handles the posts between the two sites.

As for the look of this site, I haven't gotten a chance to give it a new look and feel, so for the moment it is quite plain. We're trying to decide if we'll use the cutting board design here as well, or go with a more conservative style.