Tokyo Love Hotel
Started by a Japanese and English duo in 2017, Tokyo Love Hotel is a Melbourne based brand that organise Japanese inspired cultural events with a modern twist across the city. They are known for bringing some of the best known and up and coming Japanese contemporary DJ/musicians, performers, artists, fashion and chefs to Melbourne.
About The Project
Award-winning Logo & Print Design
Having worked with the founders before they decided they wanted to use my services again when they came up with the concept for Tokyo Love Hotel. The initial part of the project was to come up with a logo for the new brand which then lead on to designing merchandise and artwork for Tokyo Love Hotel events.
Solution
I knew from the start of this project that I wanted to create a solution that looked like a Japanese symbol using latin characters. I felt this was the perfect way to represent the fact that Tokyo Love Hotel was bringing Japanese culture to another nation.
When creating something with influences from another culture it is worth while checking that what you have created is meaningful and does not offend. With one of the founders being Japanese this was fairly easy to check. The use of the heart symbol in the logo to represent ‘love’ was ok to use in this case and in Japan they even have emojis for Love Hotels with the use of a heart symbol in them.
Whilst we’re on the topic a Love Hotel in Japan (ラブホテル, also known as boutique or fashion hotels) are hotels that offer double rooms for short periods of time… As the name suggests, the main purpose of love hotels is to provide couples with a room to spend some undisturbed time together. This is not what the events Tokyo Love Hotel put on are for but they wanted to use the name as a nod to a quirkier side of Japanese culture that brings people together.
Since the logo has been signed off I’ve created various event artwork for Tokyo Love Hotel to promote the events. Each artwork looks different from one another but the common theme is that just like the events they take inspiration from Japanese culture.
I have also created some merchandise designs which you can see above, this set of designs focused solely on the logo to help promote the brand and I hope that in the future I can expand on these by pushing things further to create some more stand out garments for the brand.
Soon after the logo was complete I shared it in a Facebook logo design group post where the owner of the group asked for designers to share their favourite logo design of that year. I was really happy with the outcome so shared the Tokyo Love Hotel logo in the post, little did we know that the owner was actually doing a secret competition where he would select his ‘Top 5 Favourite Logos’. Soon after he revealed that this is what he was doing and that the Tokyo Love Hotel logo was in his top five along with some other great designs which I was truly humbled by as the group has thousands of budding logo designers.
This appreciation for the logo gave me the push to enter it into a logo design awards called Logo Wave, which ‘exists to reward your top-notch folio of logo identity work to bring positive organisational value and career impact’. The awards are judged by some of the biggest names in the industry including David Airey, Alina Wheeler, Louise Fili, Chris Do, Ian Paget and more so was super happy when the logo made the cut and won an award!
Awards aren’t everything and certainly not the reason I do design, I always strive to create the best solutions for my clients and ones they can be proud of but winning this award was the icing on the cake for the Tokyo Love Hotel project.
Feedback
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