Craft Your Perfect Bourbon
Craft Your Perfect Bourbon is an innovative digital experience created for Buffalo Trace Distillery. While competitive brands continue to advertise based on the merit of heritage or even sex appeal, our goal was put flavor above all else. We devised an engaging application that presents bite-size factoids, providing users with a unique lesson in the bourbon-making craft in just under three minutes. I was responsible for leading the design, defining the art direction and resolving the challenge of turning complicated distillation processes into concise visuals that can be understood at a glance.
Award Winner - Gold W3 - Website - Food and Beverage
Agency: Bajibot
The US whiskey market has seen rocketing sales in the past decade, with bourbon production alone growing by more than 150% and the number of craft distilleries over the period more than quintupling.
The goal of the project was to educate and engage new Bourbon drinkers and connoisseurs alike.
The app we created helped the brand gain insight into what type of bourbon the people wanted. After hundreds of thousands of user sessions, a special "People's Choice" select was created and is currently aging in a warehouse at the distillery.
Collectors Will Go Nuts Over This One-Off Weller Bourbon
“What did the collective minds of more than 100,000 whiskey drinkers decide to make? Apparently an eight-year, 95 proof wheat bourbon, which Buffalo Trace Distillery has elected to move forward in producing as a specialty one-off release. The spirit will don the Weller name, and go by “CYPB” (short for “Craft Your Perfect Bourbon”). Buffalo Trace Distillery says the bourbon will release once every year but be in “very limited” quantities, so although its MSRP is just $40, you can expect to pay many times more than that to get your hands around a bottle.”
The Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky, has been making Bourbon for more than 200 years. It recently expanded its visitor's center.
Adhering to the brand guidelines, bold type and rich textures honor the tradition and history of Kentucky Bourbon when American pioneers and explorers pushed west to new frontiers.
Just like actual whisky-making the experience begins with the mash. After a few iterations I settled on a simple ratio chart controlled by a slider.
The performance of the site was a constant concern. Such a visually rich experience still needed reasonable load times. While concise the animated sequences still required a substantial number of frames to play smoothly.
I worked closely with the developers to optimize image sizes and provide proper file formats.
In spite of of the rich visuals. I designed the experience to be flexible. The modular structure ensured mobile responsiveness.
Warehouse "C” is a century-old aging facility at the Buffalo Trace Distillery built in 1885. In designing this section I collaborated closely with our 3D artist to create a cutaway of the the warehouse. Users could drag the barrels into the desired floor level.
For the UI I leaned heavily on slider buttons. Sliders are the de facto standard control for selecting a range of values. Users are very familiar with them and the project required usability for a wide demographic.
The team worked closely with a 3D artist to create life-like graphics.
Users were encouraged to share their results on social media.
