Taco Joint: Brand Audit + Website

The Taco Joint is a popular Tex-Mex restaurant in Dallas, Texas. Noted for their fresh made breakfast tacos and amazing lunch specials, Taco Joint has been built off of the hard work of the two men who run the business and their friendly staff.

Working from entrepreneurial instinct the two men developed a colorful identity built on custom hand-painted signage, corrugated metals, and simple tex-mex recipes. They developed a cult following and lines out the door at lunch are not uncommon.

Contemplating their next steps the two wanted to leverage their following and develop a more robust brand with an online home that was just as unique as their brick-and-mortar store.

I called my talented friend and colleague Chris Jones (click here for his website) to partner on the project. We began our discovery process by figuring out what made Taco Joint so successful and how to build the brand graphically. The major challenge is to keep the handmade appearance on a digital screen.

We worked with the two owners to identify their short and long term goals for the business. We then catalogued every single piece of artwork, hand painted element, touch point, and more. We interviewed other Taco Joint fans finding out what they enjoyed about their visits. We read all the reviews and tweets we could find. Finally we then distilled our information down to the experiential elements that mattered the most.

After presenting these findings we began digital stylistic exploration and building the website on the WordPress CMS framework so that Taco Joint staff can update the website on their own as they see fit.