Velvet Static
Website for a vinyl cocktail bar
A site for a listening bar in Louisville where the music only comes off records: the menu as Side A and Side B, a crate of record and wine pairings, the monthly Decade Ball, spot holds and a photo booth.
Problem :
A listening bar sells a mood rather than a list of drinks: a 1970s room, records instead of TVs, monthly nights with their own rules. A standard menu page loses all of that, and there are no table reservations, only events and private nights, so an ordinary booking form does not fit.
Solution :
The page speaks the language of a record. Side A holds six seasonal cocktails: tapping one drops the tonearm onto its track, the disc spins and the label takes the colour of the drink. Side B lists the classics and beer with happy hour rules. The Listening Club is a crate of ten records you flip through: a sleeve rises, the disc slides out and shows the wine it is paired with. The Decade Ball lists the next last Fridays, and each date opens “Hold a spot” with that night chosen. The hold itself is a ticket with three options (Decade Ball, Listening Club list, private night) whose stub repeats the choice live and tears off with a number at the end.
My Role :
Art direction, design, texts and build: the brand system (night walnut, menu paper, rust, mustard and olive stripes, three typefaces), the interactive record, the crate, the ticket and three first screens.
Process :
I turned each real habit of the bar into a mechanic: the record trade became a release-year slider with a 1960 to 1989 window, the photo booth became a first screen that prints guest strips, the wine list got a colour filter that dims rows instead of removing them so the layout never jumps. The live “open till” line counts shifts past midnight as the previous night.
Outcome :
A page that feels like the room: in a minute a guest knows what is on Side A tonight, when the next Decade Ball is and how to hold a spot. Three first screens (a neon glass, a record rising like the sun that can be spun by hand with inertia, and the photo booth), each with its own idea.
Tech Stack :
Next.js (App Router) + TypeScript, hand-written CSS with no UI kit, fonts through next/font. Opening hours, the live status line and every time slot are calculated in the browser in the venue’s own time zone (Intl API), so the page is right for a visitor anywhere. Animations use only transform and opacity, reveals start on a double requestAnimationFrame and nothing loops forever, so motion runs the same on Android and iPhone. Hosted on Vercel.
