Five Regional Guides That Looked Like Five Different Companies

01 — Context

A publisher managing a network of restaurant and café guides across Saudi Arabia, with each guide covering a different city such as Riyadh, Jeddah and others. Each one offered restaurant listings, reviews and editorial content for people looking for somewhere to eat.

Each guide had been launched independently and at a different time. As a result, the sites worked individually but did not function as one network.

02 — The problem

Each guide had its own logo, colours, typography and layout logic. To the reader, it was not clear that the sites belonged to the same network. Even when users discovered the other guides, there was no consistent identity or experience connecting them.

Operationally, the situation was even more difficult. Every update or change had to be implemented across multiple sites and in different ways. Adding a feature to one guide meant figuring out how to implement it across the others, and the practical decision was often not to add it at all.

Commercially, there was also a missed opportunity. A network of five regional guides could be presented as one digital asset to advertisers and partners. Five disconnected websites could not communicate the same value.

03 — What I did

I treated the network as one product with local editions, rather than five separate products. This decision became the foundation for the rest of the work.

I created one identity that could adapt to each city. A shared visual system was developed with the city name as the variable, while each city retained a distinctive colour. The result was one recognisable network with a local character for each guide.

I unified the structure and user experience. The content types, page structure, navigation logic and restaurant card layouts were standardised across the network. Once users understood one guide, they could navigate the others without having to learn a new system.

I made the network visible within each guide. Moving between cities became part of the experience, making it clear that each guide was part of a larger network rather than an independent website.

I standardised content management. A consistent method for entering and organising content was established, allowing updates to follow the same process instead of being handled differently on every site.

The work also included content and keyword analysis, a review of the existing designs and a restructuring of the information architecture to improve access to content, simplify updates and support search engine indexing.

The goal was not to create a more complicated design system. It was to create something simple and clear that could be maintained over time without having to rethink the identity or interface every time a change was needed.