Corridor Brewery & Provisions

While working on my Master of Arts at DePaul, I maintained a part-time job at Corridor Brewery & Provisions, a brewpub in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. Corridor is part of a small, but growing company of brewpubs, and the executive management consists of relatively small group of people who manage the finances, public relations and day-to-day operations of the company. Throughout my education, I have found opportunities to draw upon my writing instruction and situate some of my school assignments within this real-life context.

Employee Handbook: Conceptual Redesign

The first project I worked on was a conceptual redesign of the employee handbook for a course called Document Design. I noticed while working there that none of the employees had ever really read the handbook due to its poor design. It was a very long and unorganized document with large blocks of text and inconsistent use of formatting to highlight different types of information; in essence, it was document to be sat down and read and it didn’t facilitate the types of skimming or searching reading practices that restaurant employees are used to with such documents.

Redesign Tasks

• Researched effective, user-oriented design principles to facilitate searching and skimming
• Reorganized topics in the handbook to chunk similar content together into logical sections
• Applied styles, formatting and color to produce a noticeable information hierarchy

Final Deliverable: Conceptual Redesign

Cocktail Training Handbook: Concept

In a Technical Writing course, I also found the opportunity to produce some training literature for the bartenders, since the company lacks any such training material for that position. Drawing on research in technical communication and principles of design, I produced a portion of a cocktail “handbook” for the bar’s cocktail program. The goal of the project was to establish the concept of a reference manual that new bartenders could use to familiarize themselves with the tools and techniques that are involved in making cocktails.

Handbook Writing Tasks

• Catalogued all of the potential tools and techniques required for our cocktail menu
• Wrote descriptions of the tools
• Wrote process descriptions (instructions) for cocktail making techniques as well as the recipes
• Took photographs of drinks and tools
• Created illustrations to clarify cocktail making techniques

Final Deliverable: Concept of the Cocktail Handbook

Employee Handbook: Full Redesign

After completing these assignments I showed them to my general manager, and as a result the company had decided to review the handbook and consider creating new documentation that is more consistent, more structured, and designed better, which will be useful as the company expands. To this end, I provided them with a more practical redesign of the employee handbook than the conceptual redesign. I also created a style guide document that establishes consistent design choices and explains how to use MS Word style features to facilitate easier editing and updates in the future.