Celebrating Restaurant Leaders
Across North America

Visuals

Response

The Restaurant Innovators 2025 is an awards program that celebrates the visionaries and dedicated teams who are redefining excellence in the hospitality industry.

We featured 60 restaurant leaders and provided them with a $100 Amazon gift card, and branded swag to show their success. 



The campaign focus was to encouraging the use of social media for “winners” to amplify content; The 7shifts team would create a new awards initiative that would allow us to gather quotes, clips, or conduct short video interviews with winners. 





We would then incorporate videos, interviews etc. through our own social channels highlighting winners and secure media coverage of awards with third party media, specifically trusted publications

KEY RESULTS

107.2M

Audience Reach

50

Restaurants Awarded

PROJECT SCOPE

Print Design, Art Direction, Web Design

DURATION

May 2024 - Present

Concept

7shifts website:
building our design systems

Assets required: Social badge to ‘give’ to winners, landing page highlighting winners and why we did this, social assets (winner posts, etc.), email visuals, optional additional campaign block to our new Customers Page. 





The challenge: We didn’t know how many customers would provide us with high-quality headshots to use for the LP/socials and the deadline for submission was only 3 business days prior to the landing page launch date so we needed to come up with a creative way to solve for different numbers of headshots with a quick turnaround time.

Creating the look

Creating the look

We aimed to create visuals that mimicked the look and feel of stickers to bring in a playful vibe.

The inspiration of stickers was from a photoshoot we did earlier in the year at a bar that was coated in stickers + sharpie marks for that lived-in restaurant look. 





Between two designers, we partnered to create the look and feel of the campaign. Ariel, our motion designer built the logo lock-up, and motion graphics for the campaign, while I took on the challenge of the landing page (built in Framer) and conceptualized the orange badge. 



Together, the two of us created each of the award badges and stickers to be given out to our winners.

Building a distinctive brand presence requires consistency across all visual mediums. 7shifts serves as a technological solution for restaurants across North America. These shoots allow us to produce on-brand photography for the 7shifts website, sales collateral, and social media.

In order to showcase the contrast between the grit of back-of-house at restaurants, and the glam of the front-of-house experience, our team often shoots live on-location at real 7shifts customers in a direct-flash style. 





I act as the art director, conceptualizing our photos, arranging and directing a freelance photographer, and touching base with our customers to plan the shoot.

These shoots positions us uniquely in the restaurant tech space, where often the imagery uses a heavy reliance on stock imagery and photos of polished spaces (often the opposite experience for back-of-house restaurant work that tends to be messy, chaotic and fast-paced)

Results:
Public response

Results:
Public response

Overall, we exceeded our targets for applications, and were able to award 50 restaurants, owners or employees in a variety of categories. This fielded plenty of organic engagement including shoutouts from news organizations + several prominent industry influencers.