Big Chill | Marketing Design
Big Chill are an indoor dining and drinking venue with sites in King’s Cross (who this project was with) and Brick Lane. They began as an outdoor boutique festival and their aim was to translate that atmosphere into their venues. One of the successful avenues they’ve found of doing so is by having themed events, such as their Dirty Disco Brunch, which I was tasked with designing potential assets for.
My Role:
- Concept
- Print Design
- Social Media Design
Problem I Was Solving:
My role was to come up with a potential concept and visuals (a new A3 half tone riso print poster and supporting Instagram post) to market Big Chill Kings Cross’ Dirty Disco Brunch to their target audience, while keeping in line with their existing guidelines and using their existing template style for guidance. The poster copy was provided and I could use graphics I made or images I sourced that I deemed appropriate.
My Research and Initial Ideas:
My first step in the process was to look at past visuals they’d produced, as well as get a better understanding of their audience, which I did by looking at Big Chill’s social media presence and tags. From there, I was able to see the following about their clientele:
- Young, millennial professionals
- A love of boozy brunches
- Photograph their food before eating it
- Attend music events like festivals listening to artists like the Weeknd and Tyler the Creator
- Prefer an environment that is reasonably priced and lowkey, but they can still have fun and let loose, especially if there’s a dancefloor
- In terms of fashion, tending towards comfortable, yet trendy (i.e. crop tops, jeans, distressed jumpers, t-shirts and sunglasses used to push hair back)
All this, and the past visuals, informed the concept and the fact that it should be fun and definitely include food photography as a central point. Having visited the site where the poster would be, I was struck by the interior and so I took inspiration from that too.
Design Process and Deliverables:
For the concept, I decided to be quite literal and visually recreated a brunch scene, with avocado toast and Prosecco as the food and drink of choice (both were on the menu for the brunch.) I was inspired by this by looking at the images that people had tagged Big Chill in and majority were pictures of their brunch at the site. I wanted to put anyone who saw the poster in the mindset of being at brunch and taking a photo of their food.
With the ‘Brunch’ part sorted, I needed a way to convey the ‘dirty’ and the ‘disco’ aspects of Big Chill’s Dirty Disco Brunch. I took the idea of a clean, neat brunch setting in an Instagram, millennial world and overlaid it with the glitch, static TV effect (reminiscent of the disco era and playing into the nostalgia of millennials) to depict that this isn’t a typical brunch. For the ‘dirty’ aspect, I played around with the frame by not having the image quite contained within it.
The next stage was picking the two colours needed for the riso print aspect of the poster, so I took inspiration from the Big Chill Kings Cross site itself (pictured above.)
I used the typography they provided: Austin Bold for the logo, Archer Medium uppercase for the subfont and subtitle style text, Acrom Extra Bold lowercase for titles and Archer Book Italic for footnote style text like pricing and additional info. I used the hierarchy of information used in the previous visuals from Big Chill.
For the accompanying Instagram post, I continued with the same themes from the poster using the glitch, static TV effect and idea of disruption. With this concept, I had an outstretched hand covered with glitter to represent the disco aspect, whilst inviting others to join. The overlaid avocado aspect made the image seem like a signal to millennials, that this is the event for them to be with like-minded people.
Client’s Opinions:
The client loved the creative flair I put on the project.
Tools/Programmes I Used:
- Adobe InDesign
- Adobe Illustrator
- AdobePhotoshop