Design: Champagne Brunch

Ever thought of what the rich could do on a lazy Sunday morning? It could be anything from playing golf to taking on a few laps in the pool at an exclusive country club and perhaps even getting a nice tan poolside drinking a martini while under the sun. Or how about having a Sunday Champagne Brunch? Yes, you heard right, it’s brunch served with some really expensive champagne.

We recently finished work on some collaterals for one of the hotel’s restaurant promotions and after a few hours of tinkering with a given idea, I’d say I’m pretty happy with the results.

As always, we only had a few hours alloted to produce the needed artwork and will have to find a way to get those creative juices working and producing something useful for everybody. Deadlines are always tight in this industry and everything is being rushed. Is that a good thing? I don’t really know, but it s something I have learned to live with and actually enjoy doing.

The Collaterals

The hotel uses still artwork for displaying on large plasma screens around the hotel and also the same artwork is uploaded to the in-room hotel channel as well as to screensavers in the business centre’s workstations. Different promotions are rotated in the system much like the same way banner ads are rotated on websites.

Flyers are run as small rush jobs by an outside printer which specializes in running print jobs for deluxe hotels. (The specialization means they are used to all the supermegarush jobs we throw at them on a regular basis.) Posters are done in house on our 42-inch HP designjet 5500PS. The e-mail campaign is yet to be scheduled as we can only send out as many times to our database (a self-imposed rule) to prevent what we send out from being flagged as spam.

The Elements

The background used to create the effect needed in the artwork is from the restaurant’s actual interior shot.

Using Photoshop, we grayscaled (through mixing channels) and applied trace contour to the image. We did the trace contour at different masked layers to isolate and highlight the details in the image.

After that, we highlighted the red parts of the original picture. Red restaurant’s branding has always been using a desaturated photo while highlighting something in red something like a shoe or cuffs and other stuff. This is the first time we’ll be using a sort of inked effect or a line art drawing effect with vector artwork for this restaurant.

Viola! I’m not fully content with the outcome of the background as I know if given enough time, I could add more detail to it and polish it some more, but this took me only two to three hours of actual work. The next step was placing the vector art we downloaded from istockphoto and applying it to flyers, posters, etc…

Hope you enjoyed reading this post. On future articles, thought I don’t claim to be an expert, I hope to be able to discuss a few tricks learned from fellow designers and try to come up with a series of lessons and tips on the different softwares we all use in creating designs for print, web and multimedia.