The Maryland Distillers Guild is the trade association representing the state’s craft-distilling industry — an ecosystem of dozens of independent distilleries with a significant economic footprint and a fast-growing tourism draw rooted in Maryland’s heritage as one of the cradles of American whiskey.
The Maryland Distillers Guild needed more than a website redesign. It needed a digital destination capable of telling the story of Maryland’s craft-distilling industry while serving the very different needs of consumers, travelers, member distilleries, and legislators.
The Guild’s previous site had established MDG as the industry’s home online, but it was inward-facing and member-focused: standardized distiller listings, a basic locations map, and areas to post events and tastings, all sitting on a management system that made updates slow and inconsistent. It did little to draw new visitors, retain them, or move them to act — and it did not fully capture the scale, personality, history, or tourism potential of Maryland’s craft-spirits industry.
The new site needed to transform a tremendous amount of information about distilleries, spirits, history, events, legislation, and resources into an engaging experience that would inspire exploration and convert interest into action. At the same time, it needed to function as a sophisticated member hub — providing authenticated access to industry resources, legislative information, events, and member content — while remaining intuitive, visually compelling, and useful to the general public. And it needed to run with far less day-to-day maintenance than the site it replaced.
The challenge was to bring storytelling, destination marketing, conversion, and complex association functionality together in one cohesive digital experience — to build, in short, a tourism destination site, not just a guild site.
KTD Creative created the entire website — a massive, multidisciplinary undertaking delivered over a ten-sprint agile process across roughly six months. We began with a Strategy-First, planning-first methodology that locked every key decision into a comprehensive project plan before a single line of code was written.
That planning began with a landscape analysis of how comparable organizations tell their stories online — studying navigation, member resources, functionality, and storytelling across the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, kybourbon.com, the Pennsylvania and Oregon Distillers Guilds, New York’s distilling and cider associations, and Scotland’s Malt Whisky Trail. The Kentucky Distillers’ Association work became our north star for audience-segmented, storytelling-driven depth, and helped shape the model we built for Maryland.
Kate Tallent, Creative Director, led a formidable team of web developers, a graphic designer, an illustrator, a videographer, and a photographer, bringing every discipline together around a shared creative vision. Every member of the team worked from a creative brief we authored, creating a unified process in which strategy, content, design, technology, photography, video, and illustration continually informed one another.
As part of that effort, we also developed a robust, professionally curated photography library for the Guild, creating a versatile visual asset that could support the new website as well as the organization’s ongoing marketing and communications needs.
We worked in close partnership with the client throughout the entire process. This was a true collaboration, not a traditional agency handoff. We held weekly check-ins, ongoing working sessions, and maintained continuous communication across strategy, content, design, development, and production.
Rather than simply presenting finished work for approval, we worked alongside the client to explore ideas, solve challenges, make informed decisions, review work, and continually refine the experience. We actively solicited client feedback in real time throughout the project, allowing us to identify opportunities, address issues early, and pivot as needed.
That collaborative approach kept the client deeply involved and ensured that every major decision reflected both the strategic goals of the project and the organization’s evolving needs.
At the heart of the project was a storytelling-driven, conversion-focused destination marketing strategy.
Our goal was not simply to build an information-rich association website. We wanted to create an immersive digital destination that would make people curious about Maryland’s craft-spirits story, inspire them to explore its distilleries and communities, and give them the tools to plan a visit and take action.
We positioned the site as the digital “front door” to Maryland’s craft-spirits renaissance, built around a homegrown, handcrafted, rooted-in-the-land narrative. In collaboration with the client, we developed the central brand theme: Discover Maryland’s Spirit. Homegrown and Handcrafted.
Supported by the narrative: “From Maryland’s farms and fields to its local communities, our distillers use homegrown ingredients and time-honored techniques to craft spirits that are as rooted in this land as the people who make them.”
That idea became the foundation for the digital experience, connecting Maryland’s land, people, heritage, craft, and communities to the experience of discovering its distilleries. It carries through the finished design — from a homepage hero that opens on the theme, over a Maryland waterfront and a custom “Maryland in Miniature” state silhouette, to a footer that closes on the same illustration.
The strategy also aligned with a broader state interest: Maryland’s ambition to showcase its position as a historic and future-facing spirits-producing state. The site was built to tell that story and to give visitors tangible ways to experience it firsthand — and to sit comfortably alongside Maryland’s tourism and destination-marketing efforts.
As part of the work, we also made a subtle refinement to the organization’s existing logo — preserving the recognition and equity of the established mark while better aligning it with the new digital experience. We then developed a refined color system, paired typographic system, and three custom style tiles through multiple rounds of exploration and refinement.
We translated the strategy into a “fork-in-the-road” architecture organized around the two core audiences the site had to serve: Enthusiasts and Members.
Each audience has a distinct purpose and journey. Enthusiasts — residents, out-of-state visitors, families, and the merely curious — need to learn, explore, plan, and ultimately visit. Members need to join, participate, access resources, and engage with the Guild. That split shaped everything, from the top-level structure to the individual pathways through the site: an open, public-facing experience built to inspire and convert, and a gated, authenticated hub built to serve the industry.
Beneath that fork, the public experience is organized into distinct content wells, each with its own purpose — Learn (education, history, process, and the individual spirits), Experience (distillers, the map, events, and trip planning), and Industry (the Guild, its impact, advocacy, and news) — with a password-protected Members area behind it. Each is a purpose-built environment rather than a static bucket of pages.
To get there, we developed detailed audience personas and user journeys, grounded in a research grid mapping nine distinct audiences — from local enthusiasts and visiting tourists to member and prospective distilleries, affiliates, retailers, press, and Maryland’s own destination-marketing organizations — each with its own goals, motivations, and challenges.
We then mapped a complete information architecture and a full user flow, tracing how each traffic source (organic and SEO, tourism and state referrals, member and partner sites, paid, and direct) enters the site and is guided through learning and industry content toward a single end goal: real-world visits.
From there we wireframed every template — for desktop and mobile — and designed the full experience to high fidelity, carrying every component and interaction through to the smaller screen. The resulting modular design system was intentionally built to support both editorial storytelling and conversion, creating flexible pathways rather than simply presenting static information.
The site was built as a custom WordPress theme using a modular Gutenberg block architecture, giving the Guild’s own team the flexibility to maintain, expand, and evolve the platform long after launch — stacking pre-styled, role-aware blocks instead of reinventing each page.
KTD played a substantial editorial and creative role in bringing the experience to life. We didn’t simply design containers for stories — we created, wrote, edited, and storyboarded the storytelling experiences themselves, and determined how copy, photography, illustration, and interaction would work together across the site.
At the center is a dynamic “scrollytelling” history timeline that traces Maryland’s distilling story across nine chapters, from the early colonial period through Prohibition and into the industry’s modern resurgence.
Working with the Maryland Center for History and Culture, we sourced the historical imagery and research and wrote the narrative that carries visitors through it. We paired that with a timeline we wrote of the history of distilling in Maryland. We also wrote the copy for an illustrated “Distilling 101” experience that walks readers through the craft step by step — our process writing set to a custom illustration sequence — and “how it’s made” narratives for each of Maryland’s eight spirit categories, giving every spirit its own illustrated production story that also gathers the member logos and cocktails tied to it. In all of the projects, we researched and created a framework for the client to review, edit, and ensure the information was accurate.
We also created, wrote, and storyboarded numerous visual storytelling sections, one anchoring each major area of the site: “Rooted Here” on Experience, “Homegrown Together” on About the Guild, “Crafted Here. Felt Everywhere.” on Industry Impact, and “The Craft” on Learn. Each moves the reader through three linked beats of headline, copy, and image, with the visuals cross-fading in step with the words. We storyboarded the interaction as deliberately as we wrote the copy — mapping every scroll sequence, per-beat image and text transitions, and responsive fallback behavior — and documented it as build-ready specifications so the development team could implement each experience exactly as conceived.
These experiences were designed to move visitors beyond facts and listings — to help them understand the people, places, traditions, and history behind Maryland spirits, and to give them a reason to experience the story firsthand.
The destination-marketing strategy then connects inspiration directly to action.
A filterable directory allows visitors to explore members by region, spirit category, amenities, and more — clicking into a distiller’s page or viewing them on the map. A Visit Widget–powered trip planner and road trip builder lets visitors assemble distillery stops and complementary points along the way, into a custom route, with an architecture designed to accommodate future expansion into curated trails and regional itineraries. For instant gratification, a cocktail recipes section gives visitors something to make and enjoy right away.
Together, these experiences create a natural progression:
Discover → Learn → Explore → Plan → Visit
The goal is to turn the site from a passive information source into an active tourism tool — one that inspires visitors and then gives them practical ways to experience Maryland’s craft-spirits culture for themselves.
We commissioned the creative that brings the narrative to life. As part of the creative direction, we identified and engaged renowned editorial illustrator Alex Fine — whose work has appeared in publications including TIME, Newsweek, and The Atlantic — to create a custom illustration system for the site.
Working closely with Fine, we scoped and art-directed a system of 35 original illustration assets. It spans a signature “Maryland in Miniature” state illustration, a section-divider illustration family used throughout the experience, a suite of agriculture and ingredient illustrations, an illustrated spirit-making process that powers the “Distilling 101” sequence, machinery and tool illustrations, and a set of amenity icons — a cohesive visual language built to make the craft and character of Maryland distilling accessible and engaging.
In the finished design, that system is deployed across the site: the amenity icons mark features on every distiller page, the botanical and equipment illustrations carry the spirit “how it’s made” stories, and ownership markers identify member attributes like veteran-owned distilleries.
We also guided some of the editorial photography and the homepage hero video creation with a detailed creative brief and reviewed video footage.
As part of the broader creative effort, we developed a robust photography library for the Guild, giving the organization an extensive collection of professionally curated visual assets it can continue to use across the website, marketing, social media, communications, and future initiatives. To coordinate the enormous volume of creative assets required for the site, we authored a Photography & Brand Asset Guide covering every member distillery.
Behind the public-facing storytelling experience is a sophisticated platform designed to serve the Guild and its members.
Every distiller page is built and maintained by the member itself, through a secure backend form tied to its account — dynamic content and variables that feed searching, sorting, the map, and the trip planner, and that automatically surface a distiller’s logo and cocktails on the relevant story and learning pages. Members manage their own presence directly: their overview and imagery, their spirits and amenities, their events, and their job listings — removing the need for MDG staff to field, validate, and retire that content by hand.
The finished build includes a unified, filterable events calendar spanning association-sponsored and member-submitted events, with access-controlled visibility for member-only items; a secure, authenticated member portal serving as an industry hub; a job board; and a dynamic knowledge base and filter tool organizing members’ resources. A filterable member directory lets the public sort distilleries by category and feature, while supplemental UI components — social integrations, and an optional multilingual layer — extend the system throughout the experience.
The result is a platform that works equally hard for the public and for the organization behind it: a destination marketing experience on the front end and a sophisticated industry hub on the back end.
Underneath the experience, we engineered the site to a rigorous technical standard.
Accessibility was built in from the ground up to WCAG 2.2 Level AA, complemented by an accessibility tool that lets visitors tailor the experience to their needs. The site ships with a technical SEO architecture — meta structure, schema, and AI-readable llms.txt and robots.txt files to help both search engines and language models understand and surface the Guild’s content — plus a configured Google Analytics 4 dashboard and Google Tag Manager container mapping the conversions that matter. A modular block system, managed asset and activity tooling, and a robust form builder round out a platform designed to be maintained by the Guild’s own team.
The build was engineered for compliance as well as performance, addressing accessibility, privacy, and email standards. For launch and beyond, we created a site-specific digital Operator’s Manual and provided dedicated post-launch support.
The result is one of the most ambitious digital projects in the association’s history: a storytelling-driven destination marketing platform designed to turn curiosity into action.
The new site brings together brand strategy, editorial content, historical storytelling, illustration, photography, video, interactive tools, tourism planning, and sophisticated association functionality in one cohesive experience.
It gives Maryland’s distilleries a powerful platform for visibility and engagement. It gives the Guild a secure and scalable hub for its members and industry work. It gives the organization a substantial new library of photography and creative assets for ongoing marketing. And it gives consumers something more valuable than a directory — it gives them a reason to discover Maryland, explore its craft, plan a trip, and experience the state for themselves.
Our commitment to the Guild didn’t end with the website. Recognizing that the organization would need ongoing marketing support after launch, KTD Creative proactively created a connection between the Maryland Distillers Guild and the University of Maryland, College Park, helping establish a pathway for the Guild to bring on a marketing intern to support its continuing digital marketing, communications, and promotional efforts after the new site launches.
It’s a tangible example of how we approach client relationships: we don’t simply deliver a project and walk away. We look beyond the immediate scope to identify opportunities, make valuable connections, and help position our clients for continued success.
That philosophy was embedded throughout the project itself. By soliciting client feedback in real time, maintaining close communication, and remaining flexible enough to pivot as needs evolved, we created a process in which the client was heard, supported, and actively involved at every stage.
The result is more than a new website. It is a stronger digital foundation for the Guild’s future — a platform, content ecosystem, visual asset library, and marketing infrastructure designed to continue working for the organization long after launch.
The project is still in production and is scheduled to launch in October 2026.