Truly Deeply/Madly

Beau­ti­ful, Evoca­tive Brand Story Telling.
When the Ace Hotel decided to open in NYC they com­mis­sioned illustrator/designer Tim­o­thy Good­man to cre­ate a unique mural for the new hotel. Tim­o­thy joined a rather exclu­sive group of illus­tra­tors who have done-so pre­vi­ously for this hip hotel brand.

The Ace Hotels are not the first to have employed artists to cre­ate new and excit­ing brand expe­ri­ences for their guests — Denmark’s Hotel Fox prob­a­bly take the cake for the first and the best — but when it comes to a hotel brand lever­ag­ing illus­tra­tion to cre­ate a con­sis­tent brand expe­ri­ence across their port­fo­lio, the guys at Ace deserve a round of brand design applause. Using illus­tra­tion as part of your brand design strat­egy can cre­ate a pow­er­ful tool for brand story-telling.

Here at Truly Deeply we love this approach. Recently when we re-designed and re-launched the Spud­bar brand, we worked with awe­some Mel­bourne paste-up artist Miso to cre­ate art­work both in the stores and across the brands visual com­mu­ni­ca­tions (you can check out the Spud­bar brand iden­tity re-design project here).

Tim­o­thy says of the project:
Open­ing in NYC last year, with loca­tions in Seat­tle, Port­land and Palm Springs, Ace is known for its hip­ster and motor­cy­cle chic aes­thetic. The lobby buzzes with lots of peo­ple, fur­ni­ture, music, lap­tops and espres­sos. Their café, Stump­town, has gained lots of praise, along with their British gas­tropub, The Bres­lin, which is run by the own­ers of the Spot­ted Pig in the West Vil­lage. Oh, and Q-Tip spins every Fri­day night. Not bad, right?
While brain­storm­ing in the weeks before, it was impor­tant to ask some larger ques­tions before I started my sketch: What’s its rel­e­vancy? What’s its impor­tance? Can it become engag­ing or par­tic­i­pa­tory? Hav­ing an idea for a mural that’s both rel­a­tive to the space it exists in and reflec­tive of the cul­ture around it is not an easy task to accom­plish. How­ever, I felt it was some­thing I had to account for.
With those ques­tions in mind, I hand drew 99 pic­ture frames to cre­ate a dense wall of “dis­cov­ery” about NYC that could be passed to the com­mon tourist stay­ing in the room. Each frame con­tains a dif­fer­ent fact / love / tid­bit / thing of inter­est / or shout-out to a place I dig in the city. At roughly 120 square feet, the art was drawn impre­cisely to cap­ture the spon­tane­ity and grit of the city. I used paint mark­ers and opaque black paint to help this tech­nique excel. Con­se­quently, it became a labor of love, an act of obses­sive­ness that was pleas­antly grueling.

We say; ‘a lovely piece of evoca­tive visual brand design Timbo’

You can check Tim­o­thy Good­mans site here: blog.tgoodman.com
Pho­tographs by Mark Dye.

Related arti­cles

• Ace Hotel x Con­verse Chuck Tay­lor All Star Bosey (runnerupclothing.wordpress.com)
• Com­mune Design’s Roman Alonso’s Liv­ing Room (apartmenttherapy.com)
• At these hotels, rooms are almost an after­thought (theglobeandmail.com)

Tags: Ace Hotels mural, Advertising, Brand Agency, Brand Communication, Brand Communications, brand communications agencies Melbourne, Brand Design, brand designer, Brand DNA, Brand Experience, brand experiences, Brand Expression, Brand Identity, brand identity agencies, brand identity designers, brand identity designers Melbourne, Brand Personality, Brand Strategy, Brand Voice, brand-designers-Melbourne, brand-gesture, Brand-Storytelling, brandamentalist, Corporate Image, Creative Ideas, Dave Ansett, David Ansett, Graphic Design Melbourne, Melbourne brand designers, Melbourne Brand Strategy, Truly Deeply, Visual Language

This entry was posted on Monday, April 11th, 2011 at 7:00 am and is filed under Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand-Storytelling, Experiences, Graphic Design Melbourne, Visual Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.