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James Ashe, Managing Partner
Celebrating Christmas In Style with The Old Stocks Inn
We help a lot of hotels with their marketing, so we’re used to making venues stand out against the competition when it comes to promoting their Christmas activity.
When the property has a quirky interior and a target audience with high design values, then it becomes a real challenge – just how we like it.
This year, The Old Stocks Inn asked us to develop a distinctive look that would help bring their quirky yuletide events to life. Rather than the usual festive fayre served up by other Cotswold hotels, The Old Stocks are putting on a pop-up après-ski bar (the only one in the Cotswolds), hosting an extravagant yet modern feast for New Year’s Eve, and offering cocktail masterclasses as an alternative to Christmas parties.
With such a different approach to work with, the pressure was on to come up with something quirky to match the thinking behind the events. We created a family of multi-use icons that took inspiration from how the hotel interior fuses the traditional Cotswolds with cool Scandinavian design.
We chose traditional or local motifs, such as Christmas puddings, St Edward’s Church tower and a New Year’s Eve clock, but put our own fresh, contemporary take on them by applying a white-out, line drawing–style finish.
There was a practical element to our thinking, too. When designing the icons, we wanted to create a versatile set that could be used on any kind of collateral – either on physical media like posters and leaflets, or on digital assets such as web graphics and social media adverts. The icons were also designed to work well on the patterned backgrounds that are used on everything from the website to takeaway coffee cups.
The only problem with designing graphics like this well ahead of Christmas is that it’s got us thinking about wintry nights, mulled wine and epic Christmas dinners – and it’s far too early for any of that! Suppose there’s only 64 days to go …
Feeling inspired? Check out some of our other blogs:
- Bringing the Home Nations to life
- A matter of influence: using video to finalise sales
- Filming a promotional video for Warwick Edging
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