Chanks
A bar and music room one flight up from South Main. The site has to find the door for you, then tell you what is happening tonight before anything else.
Chanks is a bar and live music room upstairs on South Main Street in Oxford, Ohio. It has two problems most venues do not: you cannot see it from the street, and what matters about it changes every night.
The design problem
A venue one flight up is invisible to anyone who does not already know it exists. And a music room’s website goes stale the moment it becomes a brochure — the only genuinely useful thing it can say is what is happening tonight.
What was built
The site is built around those two facts. “Tonight” comes first, above everything, with a live open/closed state and the next set time in the header ticker. A seven-day poster wall carries the week’s lineup, so the room’s rhythm is legible without opening Instagram.
Finding the entrance is treated as a real task, not a footer address: the copy tells you to find the door and head up one flight, and directions are a primary action rather than a fine-print link. A private bookings page handles the other side of the business, with the banner that runs across the top of the site.
Design direction
Chanks does not want to look like the tavern down the street, and the site does not let it. The identity is red, black, and loud — heavy condensed type at maximum scale, a ransom-note wordmark, 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.