Cover Story · Folio 01
A creative director who insists every cafe website should taste like the room it’s in — not a template with a logo dropped on top.
Aria designs every Mitra site from scratch. No themes, no swap-the-logo systems. Each cafe gets its own grid, its own typography, its own pace — built to feel the way the room feels at 8am on a Tuesday, when the espresso machine is still warming and the regulars haven’t yet looked up from their newspapers.
Before Mitra she spent eight years at agencies in Singapore and KL doing brand work for hotels, jewellers, and one regrettable airline. The rooms were taller, the budgets larger, the briefs further from the kitchen. She joined Mitra in January 2026 to bring agency-grade craft to operators who’d otherwise never afford it — the kopi uncle, the second-generation roaster, the one-room bakery that opens at five.
What she calls the work, plainly, is listening: to the way an owner pronounces the name of their dish, to which table the regulars take, to the song that plays when the shop opens on a wet Saturday. The website is downstream of all of it.
A cafe’s website should taste like the room it’s in.— A. Tan, on the only brief that matters
Selected work from 2024–2026. Each project is a separate design system — no reused components, no shared typeface, no shortcuts. The only constant is the question Aria asks first: what does the room sound like at the quietest hour?
Lead designer — brand refresh and site build for a kopitiam-modern hybrid run by a third-generation operator. Replaced a 2014 Wix page with a typographic system pulled from the original 1971 hand-painted signboard.
Walk-in traffic up 38% in the first quarter; the owner stopped apologising for the website.
Creative direction — identity, photography art-direction, and a single-page site for a specialty roaster sourcing from West Java smallholders. Built a producer-first hierarchy: farmer names larger than the cafe’s.
Wholesale enquiries from Jakarta and Singapore tripled within six weeks of launch.
Design lead — brand and bilingual site for an Indonesian-Japanese fusion cafe owned by a husband-and-wife team. Two type systems, one grid — the menu reads cleanly in Bahasa and Japanese without either language feeling translated.
Booked out for eight weeks before opening.
Have a small room that needs a site?
Use the subject line “For Aria — [topic]”. New project enquiries, speaking, or a sharp opinion on a menu — all welcome at the studio mailbox.