Matt Bury - GroupHotels.com

Based in New York, GroupHotels.com is a free online service and group travel expert. They utilise proprietary technology to source the lowest hotel room rates for groups. This technology provides customers with quotes directly from hotels. Over 70,000 hotels are able to bid for bookings, groups can then book the hotel directly and enjoy the best rates possible.

They hired me to rebrand them.

A component of the re-brand is a ‘G’ represented as a door-hanger.
This enables the brand to be physically integrated into the environment of hotel partners.

This interaction ultimately influenced the new brand colours, with consideration for how it would present to viewers, in terms of colour theory and influence.

Public spaces commonly use colour in signage to provide a visual language that informs of warnings, orders and potential hazards. This typically relies on warm colours and reinforces instinctual warnings from nature.

Hotel partners are likely to already use door hangers in warm in colours. To increase the chance of Group Hotels’ hangers being used, the new brand colour needed to be from the opposite side of the colour spectrum, whilst still being bright and impactful.

Further consideration was made to avoid similarities with pre-existing competitor brands. It is better to provide the audience with a strong differential to aid identification of each brand.

The logo is one solid colour, so that change is minimal when presenting in black or white.

A 5º angle makes the door hanger more playful and indicative of it hanging in the physical environment.

A font that is well supported with web-fonts and personality was chosen, Raleway Extra Bold and Medium. This also has deep negative space inside the G which provides a good mechanism to accommodate a door handle

I created a new slogan, guided by the Group Hotels’ commitment to ‘empower groups’ and strive to ensure they aren’t impeded from traveling. It includes both the literal meaning of accommodating travellers, as well as - inclusive of need and being non-discriminatory.

The claim can serve as a base for future communication by maintaining the stem and adding words to the beginning and end of the statement. In combination with the logo the claim can be placed as a sub-line at the end of the logo mark.

When presenting the logo on the hanger it should be white …and on avatars …and on banners

To accompany the headline font Raleway, after research, Noto was chosen as the house font, for all body copy needs in both print and web.

Noto has been specially designed with over 800 languages in mind, enough to service nearly every international traveller visiting the Group Hotels website and reading accompanying printed literature.