Buzz Inn Steakhouse is a family restaurant and bar chain with twelve locations across Washington — Arlington, Ellensburg, three in Everett, Granite Falls, Lake Stevens, Marysville, Monroe, Snohomish, and two in Wenatchee. I worked at the Everett Evergreen Way store as a server and picked up the promotional design work on the side, producing holiday campaign graphics and event promotion across 2016 and 2017.
The constraint that shaped everything was that the chain had no consistent promotional design and no budget to buy one. Each holiday came around with a few days' notice and needed a graphic that worked on Facebook, on a phone, and printed and taped to a door. Two audiences had to be served at once: the chain as a whole, and individual stores running their own night. That split is the reason some pieces list all twelve locations and one lists a single street address and phone number.
I built each holiday around one dominant visual idea rather than a kit of seasonal clip art, because a graphic that has to read at thumbnail size in a feed cannot carry more than one. St. Patrick's Day ran two ways — a chain-wide square with the specials set as leader-dot menu lines over a mottled green field, and a Facebook cover for the Evergreen Way store with its own drink list, its own best-dressed contest, and its own phone number. Easter became a single oversized pink egg with embossed chevron banding, cropped hard so the specials had a clean field to sit in. Cinco de Mayo used the flag palette as torn paint splatter around a black center with the prices set on angled red flags. Mother's Day was deliberately the quietest of the run — tulips on whitewashed planking, outlined type, no price flags at all.
The one constant was the logo. The Buzz Inn mark is a three-tone flame between "BUZZ" in yellow and "INN" in red, set in a distressed slab, and it is loud. Every layout had to give it room without letting it fight the holiday palette, which is why the flame usually sits centered at the top with air around it rather than tucked into a corner.
Theme nights were the other track. The chain ran a Texas Hold'em Tournament of Champions rotating through the stores on a weekly schedule, and that graphic had more information to carry than any of the holidays: buy-in, sign-up time, table draw, rebuy window, optional add-on, and which of the twelve locations played on which night. I set the rules in a dark panel with a red tab down its edge and put the four-night schedule underneath as a plain two-column list, because someone checking whether their store plays on Tuesday should not have to read a poster to find out.
The work was never a formal brand engagement — it was a server with design skills filling a gap the chain had no one else to fill. The graphics ran across the chain's locations and its Facebook, Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor profiles through 2017.
