Wander Bar Brand Application
Academic Project | 2025 | Branding, Print & Social Media
Luxury hotels aim for identities that feel effortless, but that impression is built through hundreds of small details. A guest may not register the way a menu, room key, or social post looks, but each one subtly shapes how the brand is perceived.
For this project, I worked with the existing identity of Wander, a Hilton-owned cocktail bar whose visual language is built around the idea of travel. The brand uses a graphic device that is meant to represent cities visited and paths taken during a long journey. The arrangement of these lines and dots is unique to each Wander location, allowing the device to add a subtle sense of personality to its visual elements.
The graphic device already represents a map seen from above, and I noticed that similar patterns appear in aerial photography and macro photos of leaves.
For the cover of Wander's annual report, I used the lines in the graphic device to mirror the edges of a leaf and let the dots sit on top of the veins of the leaf, like cities along roads.
I used a traditional grid for the layout of the annual report, but took inspiration from Wander’s logo. The content begins more compactly before gradually opening across the spread, echoing the same sense of horizontal movement found in the identity.
When I began designing a seasonal menu, I looked for a way to acknowledge the season while working alongside the existing menu design. My goal was that the updates would blend in so well that they felt invisible. I transformed the dots into stars, and added a seasonal colour called smoked chestnut to the existing palette.
Hex #6E2707
RGB 110, 39, 7
CMYK 0, 65, 94, 57
