City Beer Store (Branding / Website Template Design)
City Beer Store is a renowned haven of craft beer in San Francisco. With growing popularity, the owners decided to relocate up the street in the SOMA neighborhood that needed a brand uplift.
Contributions
- Logo Exploration
- Color & Type Brand Expression
- Brand Guideline Build
- Template Site Selection / CSS Customization
- Collateral Template Design
The Challenge
With this last move, City Beer Store needed to upgrade their brand with a more polished look and feel that helped reflect the fun, inviting, and artisanal experience that beer-lovers will have at the new venue. With the new brand look, the company was popular through their event hosting and needed a platform/blog to post on. They also needed a website that they could use to not only promote their craft beers that were on constant rotation, but also to showcase their new food menu as they planned to extend into a restaurant as well.
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PROCESs
BRANDING
I assisted in designing a matured version of the brand that City Beer Store is known to have: adventurous, fun, but also fresh and a bit more elevated.
While we designed a new and updated logo for them, I created a fresh new color palette and supporting typeface that can be used across all forms of brand expression through digital or print.
TEMPLATE BUILD & PRINT COLLATERAL
Due to the requirements of the client, we needed to build the site using Shopify in order to keep future thinking in mind with products they wished to sell on the site.
It was my responsibility to research and find a template that could accommodate the look and feel that the new brand represented, while still being easy enough for the client to manage on their own. Once the template was chosen, I went in and customized the CSS and typography to match the brand, and populated the site with the correct pages and content provided.
SOLUTION
After the brand was finalized, I created brand guidelines showing how to use their new typography, color palette, photography, and a refreshed/modernized logo across all platforms (digital + print + in-venue).
Along with the website, the client also needed help with print collateral. I designed a multitude of templates for menus and event posters that the client could update in-house, as well as creating a new set of business cards reflecting the now-current brand identity.
RESULTS
Since launch the client has been managing their website easily with updating their blogs, tap list, and bottle shop. They’ve been keeping their brand guidelines close while also utilizing all the templates and signage we designed for them.
LESSONS LEARNED
Work with what you got. Part of the main challenge for this project, particularly for the website, was not being able to customize any back-end other than colors and type. The client wanted a site that could work with a blog and events. However after much research for templates that featured a blog/event page, it became obvious that we had to use one template for both content types. This took some adapting, but I provided the proper documentation to demonstrate how it can work for both.