Northbound had outgrown a single-page Squarespace site. They wanted a real home for the menu, the events calendar, and the story of the brewery — without the four-month timeline two local agencies had quoted them. They needed it ready before festival season.
Six pages: home, beers, taproom, events, story, contact. The menu and events feeds were moved into Sanity so the floor manager could update tap lists from a phone. We wrote the brand voice in the first two days and held it through every page. The visual direction took its cue from old shipping crates — warm paper, muted ink, hand-set headlines.
Day 1–2: brand direction and sitemap. Day 3–5: design pass and copy draft. Day 6–7: build and CMS wiring. Day 8: client review and revisions. Day 9: ship and DNS cutover. Taproom reservations went live before the weekend.
A small operations detail — staff updating menus from a phone — drove more design decisions than the homepage. We now scope the CMS conversation in the first day, not the last.
“We sent one email on a Monday and were taking reservations by the next Friday. The site looks like the brewery — not like a template.”