Hotel logos - Grand Plaza Hotel & Resort.

Behind the Design Scenes: This project (for a resort hotel startup) was one of the first logos ever to appear in our graphic design portfolio, was one of the first international logos we developed and accordingly remains a sentimental favorite. Designed in early 1996, the project was created via our newly launched online graphic studio (see here for more TLF history) - back in the day of 2400 baud modems (yikes!) and was one of the precursors to the online logo design industry. This was an interesting graphic design project - the logo featured above pretty well came by accident. The Grand Plaza Hotel was to be a fairly upscale tropical resort vacation spot, so our (then) sole designer began to play around with a variety of typical vacation images - Palm trees, beaches, coconuts, flowers - without much success. All were viewed as being too 'cliche' and common. One of the graphic series took a different route - messing around with a series of abstract shapes and circles. When the client saw some of the initial briefs, they automatically saw a G, P, H (Grand Plaza Hotel) and selected that series of sketches to work with through to finalization. Here's the rub - our designer NEVER designed the logo to feature ANY letters - it was simply an abstract graphic. It was only when the client saw the 'hidden' typography did he even realize that the graphic contained the hotel's initials. After a series of minor revisions, here's what we came up with. As an aside, the logo was used for several years until it was bought over by a large hotel & resort chain - then the logo was changed to a tropical flower, one of our original ideas from 1996 (that were shelved for being 'too obvious'). Sigh

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