I had the opportunity to help a new brewery open their doors in the charming community of Evergreen, Colorado. A small mountain town, Evergreen is plagued by overpriced or mediocre food without a brewery in sight. We took this opportunity to fulfill several community needs with one establishment: The Lariat Lodge Brewing Company & Gastropub.

Our team did everything we could from the demolition, rebuild, and interior design to transform the old Evergreen Conference Center into a place where the locals treated as a home away from home and tourists make a point of visiting. In addition to helping with the demo and rebuild, I took charge of creating a brand from scratch with only a logo, landing page, and interior design swatches as a foundation. I created a rustic but elegant feel to match the atmosphere and executed it into all of the remaining signage on the property, several menu templates, invitations and flyers, as well as carrying it through to the apparel while coordinating with the vendors to ensure a quality product.

The menu was a particular focus area. After working with the owners and chef, we realized that the menus were going to need to be printed on a fairly consistent basis and we didn’t have the budget, or often time, to get them professionally printed each time. I worked with a local printer to print a large quantity of menu “blanks” of the full-color border and logo on a paper that we could print on with a standard laser printer. I then created a word template for each menu, with paragraph and character styles, so that the LLBC team can easily update the menu content on-site as needed.

LLBC opened on Halloween 2015, packed wall-to-wall, and has been thriving ever since.