Responses by David Traina, creative director, Leo Rabelo, designer, Brian Anarell, lead developer, Jason de Jesus, developer and Kristi Jones, account manager, Traina Design

Background: The Ballast Point Brewing Company website provides an immersive introduction to the company’s product portfolio, history, culture and obsession with quality. The target audience includes craft beer enthusiasts worldwide.

Highlights: The site features authentic storytelling through the use of video and its striking illustrations used on the beer labels. We created engaging product detail pages, highlighted each of its nine unique locations and incorporated social components throughout the site.

Challenges: The breadth of Ballast Point’s product portfolio and artwork library meant a lot of content curating and building a robust yet intuitive backend CMS to allow for easy updating. Being able to maintain the site was a core functionality requirement for the team at Ballast Point. We not only delivered a beautiful site that hit on all of the objectives, but we also gave them a streamlined backend user experience that will serve the company for years to come.

Favorite details: The integration of the label illustrations—created by local legend Paul Elder—into the digital space. The illustrations were introduced as textures throughout the site and used in support of the product’s appealing visuals. They can be located in the “Our Artwork” section, and play a large role in all the product detail pages.

Navigational structure: The navigation was structured to be scalable in order to keep up with the brewery’s foreseeable growth. It was important that the user could easily browse through the products and showcase locations. Another key point was to have the utility navigation bar unite both the merchandise store and main website, creating a seamless experience for those shopping through the website.

Technical features: Although the website was built in Wordpress, the goal was to create a fully custom and responsive experience. Multiple integrations were added for the user’s convenience, such as a beer finder tool, which displays the nearest Ballast Point location using geolocation, as well as delivery service options and a customized shop experience for every product and location detail page.