Collection of environmental graphics for luxury and lifestyle brands

For this week-long conference sponsored by Nielsen Research, we needed a hotel/conference center lobby takeover for the San Antonio Marriott, a very conservative venue where management was concerned that our branding shouldn't overpower existing venue design. The place was huge, so we needed a graphics approach that could be learned quickly enough by attendees to establish comprehensive way finding, but was distinctive enough to be able to still articulate the Consumer 360 brand with type and color in public places. Mission accomplished, I think.

There’s also an extensive set of digital tools for this conference: email blasts to save the date, and an-inconference mobile app.

Finally, we had to trick out the individual meeting rooms for the conference events themselves. This is where we actually had a chance to develop more expressive graphics than we were allowed in the lobby and corridors of the complex (see last three images.)

The objective here was to create a memorable social activation and concert experience to celebrate the kick-off of NYC’s Ad Week at the Play Station Theater. The venue’s stage, bars, halls and columns were already branded by a separate team, so we are concentrating here on the digital video applications. Spotify’s main corporate color was a PMS Blue 072 (Klein Blue) so our key task was finding related colors which would allow us to use smooth and pleasing gradients as simple unifying elements across all 19 LED screens in this digital space. We used a PMS 3385 seafoam green to create a primary combination (the blue/green seen in the top animation here) and a PMS 134 sunflower yellow for a secondary combination which would allow some variety (seen in the second animation.)

We could be assured of venue-wide fully synchronized playback from the BlackMagic 40x40 6G SDI.
So the exterior marquee (top) and the interior standard 1920x1080 screens (below) thus both use the same basic approach: The screen starts out with an undulating ambient gradient flow of color with event lockups.
A gradient color wash clears the branded screen. Featured artists and information about the event display over the gradient as the loop begins again by washing over the current text animation screen with the animated
gradient color, and then event lockups.

The standard interior screens do incorporate some lifestyle imagery as interstitials to give more of a sense of the celebration, whereas the exterior marquee does without, primarily for bandwidth concerns.

There was also a 181” LED video matrix in the lobby, (see third image, at bottom)  which was by far the largest display in the venue, but our design was simple enough to allow for robust and impactful playback even at such a challenging size.

’Wichcraft came to us in their continuing effort to perfect the art of the sandwich. They were doing well at the core business: artisanal flavor, quality ingredients, and a proper gourmet sandwich experience at reasonable cost. The bulk of their business is done when you’d expect: weekday lunchtimes.

Our task was to find a way to drive evening traffic into the stores. The stores shut at 6, but there’s nothing stopping them opening later – they pay rent 24 hours, after all. We felt the easiest target will be those people living in the neighborhood who lunch at ‘wichcraft and have positive feelings toward the brand.
So our design had to translate these positive associations into a new occasion: different enough to make it clear this is not the lunchtime menu; consistent enough to say that everything good about lunch is retained at dinner time; and eye-catching enough to get people through the door.

Specific deliverables were:

• A treatment to the current ’wichcraft identity to communicate a separate (but consistent and coherent) evening offering.
• A viewpoint on how to apply this new identity across their current assets, mindful of what’s realistic to swap out every afternoon in-store.
• An additional consistent breakfast treatment (if it was decided that breakfast ALSO needs its own signage)

In order to maintain unified vision for the brand group, color strategies to communicate the dinner option were explored in PMS 1935 red and PMS 2716 blue to contrast with the PMS 3975 light green used for lunch. Besides purely graphic options, it was soon found that we had to generate the verbal distinction of “dinner at wichcraft “ to maintain brand feeling. So Breakfast and Brunch and were retrofitted with sub-identities in PMS 513 purple and PMS 121 yellow to create more distinctions in foods and mealtimes offered, broadening perception of what ’witchcraft is.

We offered the client graphic options to use as a supplement to the identity that can exist across media. For example, we introduced the subtle digital-clock graphic elements, again with minimal requirement to switch identity design. These merely piggyback on existing visual equities to create a graphic distinction that says ‘open for dinner’.