Awake Chocolate

The Brief #

Awake Chocolate needed a store locator that felt like part of the brand, not a generic utility bolted onto the website.

• Role: Designer / front-end implementation
• Client: Awake Chocolate
• Timeline: 2013
• Platform: Responsive web store locator
• Status: Released

Awake Chocolate made caffeinated chocolate bars and needed a way to help people find them in the real world. I designed and built a locator experience that worked across desktop and mobile, then pushed Google Maps styling much further than I expected to make it feel consistent with the rest of the site.

The Problem #

A store locator sounds straightforward until the map becomes the interface. The challenge was not just dropping pins on a default embed, it was making the experience feel like Awake. Rich browns, warm leather textures, and the brand's blocky type all had to carry through from the surrounding site into the search, results, and directions views.

That meant tuning the Google Maps JSON theme layer by layer until the roads, water, and labels stopped fighting the interface and started supporting it.

The Constraint #

The harder part was the data. Awake was distributed across gas stations in Ontario at the time, and the locations were not sitting in a clean, ready-to-use dataset. I geocoded the stores by hand, one by one, until the locator had enough useful coverage to work as an actual customer tool instead of just a visual concept.

That project left a lasting lesson: map-based products often look like a visual design challenge on the surface, but the real work is usually structure, coverage, and accuracy underneath.