Claire Henry.

Hey there, I'm Claire Henry. I tell stories for food and beverage businesses for a living and I'm really obsessed with getting them right.

Illustration and brand research inform everything I do. From strategy and websites to typography and menus, these two disciplines help me communicate the richness of what my clients create for other people every single day.

I specialize in food and beverage simply because I love it. I grew up around restaurants, worked in them, and still spend a lot of my time in them. Our restaurants, cafes, and bars make up a massive part of our cultural identity as a society, along with taking up a good part of my own. It's a gift to work in a field where I not only get to make art, I get to enjoy it in the form of coffee, food, and cocktails as well.

My process includes steps other designers might call wasteful. I study the corners of bars to see if I can work them into a custom website. I visit the historical sites I'm supposed to illustrate for a menu, looking for a better angle that doesn't exist online. I dig through local archives looking for details that have been overlooked or forgotten. Details aren't something I add at the end. They're very much where I start.

There's too much noise in the food and beverage industry for any part of a story to be left behind. I tend to work for people who are masters of their craft: people who care about their work as much as I care about mine. Two of them have even won James Beards. My job is to make sure that care survives the entire journey from kitchen to customer.