The commission from the Telegraph Hotel to design artwork for the new rooftop bar was a dream come true for COVKID. The hotel’s MidCentury theme encapsulates the main principle behind COVKID: Celebrating Coventry Design.
The hotel had run a community contest to find names for cocktails some months ago, and “covmopolitan” was one of the winners. We loved the concept of “the Covmopolitan” not only as the name of a drink, but to explore how the play with words works at different levels; as a glamorous cocktail, but also making a reference to a new identity of a proud cov kid who is also an unapologetic citizen of the world.
We wanted to convey this multi-layered playfulness through graphics, and to do that we drew inspiration from the 1932 Dubonnet campaign by A.M. Cassandre, which ran for twenty years and is considered one of the all-time greatest examples of graphic wit.
We took the famous idea of a sequence in which the drink changes the mood of the image through colour, but we pushed it a bit further and changed also the expression of the character as colour fills the typography to reveal the Covmopolitan concept. We worked up the image in the 1950’s style of illustration and layered it with references to the city and the hotel. The knoll-style high stools are featured in the rooftop bar, the pattern of the dress is from the tiles surrounding the Godiva clock in Broadgate, and the spire of the new cathedral is featured in the form of a cocktail stirrer.
As a two-person project, the CovKid design process involves some initial research and discussion, and from there the idea goes on to a sketchbook where it is developed, and then rendered in Adobe Illustrator. At this stage there is another discussion to adapt the tone and bounce final ideas until we are completely satisfied with the final design.
“We loved the concept of “the Covmopolitan” not only as the name of a drink.”
CovKid
We have had very positive feedback from the public on the mural which captures the glamour of the new hotel that our client was keen to reinforce, whilst celebrating a style that is uniquely Cov.
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Photos Credit: Emily Tyler (unless otherwise stated).
