Bud Hut is a cannabis retail chain in Washington. I worked at the Everett store on Highway 99 and handled design work alongside the counter job — signage, promotional material, and internal documents. The budtender QC review sheet was one of the internal pieces, and it solved a buying problem rather than a marketing one.
Vendors bring samples. Someone has to decide whether the shop carries the product. At Bud Hut that judgement lived in whatever notes a budtender happened to write down, which meant two people assessing the same strain produced records that could not be compared, and a buyer looking back a month later had no way to tell whether a product had been rejected on quality or simply forgotten. The ask was a single sheet that made every review produce the same shape of information.
I designed it around six scored criteria — packaging, product appearance, smell and taste, effects, likelihood to recommend, and likelihood to purchase — each rated one to five and each followed by its own comment row. Splitting recommend from purchase was the useful distinction: a budtender can rate a product worth suggesting to a customer without thinking the shop should stock it, and collapsing those into one score would have hidden exactly the disagreement a buyer needs to see. The rating marks are set as small cannabis leaves rather than numbers, which kept the scale readable at a glance on a clipboard in a back room.
Above the scores sits the identifying block: vendor, strain, product type, SKU, weight per serving, THC and CBD figures, suggested retail, and whether the shop already carries it. That last field matters more than it looks — a reviewer who knows the store already stocks something scores it differently, and the form should capture that context rather than pretend it does not exist. The foot of the sheet ends on the only question the document exists to answer: should this product be sold here, yes or no, over both an employee and a manager signature line.
I gave the form its own identity. The Budtender QC mark is a forward-leaning italic wordmark with "The Cannabis Analysis" set beneath it, built to read as a stamp rather than as brand decoration, and kept visually separate from the Bud Hut retail logo. That separation was intentional. A document that evaluates what the store buys should not look like the store's own advertising.
The first version put everything on one page and worked, but it ran dense — the criteria blocks sat too close and the sections bled into one another when photocopied. The second version opened the spacing, boxed the reviewer fields at the head, gave each criterion its own bordered band with an alternating fill, and pushed a line at the foot directing reviewers to continue on the reverse rather than cramming notes into the margins. That version became the standard sheet.
Artwork was delivered as print-ready files with PDF exports so any store could print its own copies without going through me.
