Hell Bay - Brief, Research and Initial Ideas


Hell Bay is a four star hotel on the Isle of Bryher in the Scilly isles. Nixon Design will be rebranding the hotel in the future, so as my first project on my placement, I had a go at creating a visual identity for it. 




Hell Bay has received multiple awards, and with this rebrand are looking to refresh their images; they are now focusing on health and wellbeing a bit more and want their visual identity to reflect this. As a result they will have a younger target audience; maybe couples in their 20’s/30’s who are interested in health and fitness would be a good example of a demographic to focus on. 

As initial research I looked into the hotel and its current branding. The logo they are using at the moment is a painting by a local artist, so a consideration when being briefed was whether this image or a version of it should still be present in order to preserve continuity. For this reason a lot of the initial logo designs incorporated shapes from the geography of this painting and shapes of the boats. Quite a good direction was using a basic curved line representing the sea level/wave in the painting. This is evocative of the scenery and location of the island based hotel. 



Another consideration was the typeface for the logo; Hell Bay is quite an intense name, its called that because in the 18th and 19th century ships used to crash in the bay because off the jagged rocks that stick out from the water. Because of the intensity of the name, using bold type does not give it the right tone of voice, so ti needed to be lighter. Ultimately I decided a sans serif font would work better because its more modern and targets the demographic better. However this still needed to be applied appropriately to suggest the quality of the hotel. 



When picking colour, the obvious choice was to go for a blue to represent the sea, the current visual identity is also blue so that would carry over nicely. However then I researched more into colour psychology and found that green is very evocative of health and wellbeing and freshness, so I experimented with some teal and turquoise hues to mix these two colours. 



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