Chanks

Chanks is an upstairs bar and live music room on South Main Street in Oxford, Ohio. The website needed to make the venue feel immediate: what’s happening tonight, what’s coming up this week, where to go, and how to book the room for a private event.

The design problem

Two things make a music room hard to put online. What matters about it changes every night, so anything written like a brochure is out of date by the weekend. And the venue is one flight up, which means the address alone is not enough — people need to know which door and that they are heading upstairs.

What was built

Tonight comes first. The top of the page carries the current event, a live open/closed state, and a status strip that pulls from the same hours data as the schedule further down, so the two can’t disagree. Below that, a seven-day poster wall lays out the week’s lineup, so the room’s rhythm is readable without opening Instagram.

Getting there is treated as a real task rather than a line in the footer: directions are a primary action, and the copy says plainly that the entrance is on Main and the room is upstairs. Private bookings get their own page and form, so the events side of the business is not competing with tonight’s show for space.

Implementation

Hours, events, the announcement strip, and the photo gallery all come from small data files the venue can edit — adding next week’s lineup does not involve touching the layout. The open/closed logic runs in America/New_York and handles closing times past midnight, so a 2:30 AM close still belongs to the night before.

Design direction

Chanks does not want to look like the tavern down the street, and the site does not let it. Black and red, oversized condensed type, a ransom-note wordmark, poster-style event cards, and the venue’s own photography of a real night — uncropped and unglamorous. The restraint elsewhere in this portfolio is the point of contrast: the art direction belongs to the business, not to the studio.