RAR on the Rooftops: Design Annual 2022 Entries

As the winter season comes to a close and spring pops up around the corner, we’re all yearning for some freshness. Luckily, Graphis has you covered! Read on for the freshest designs in our Design Annual 2022 competition.

 It’s up to the rooftops for this week’s first featured design: “Rooftop at QT” (above), designed by Anya Anackov and Thorsten Kulp of the Australian-based Toben design firm. Toben is an independent studio specializing in branding, art direction, and design, and has won a handful of awards for their work, including two Silver awards in branding from Graphis in our Design Annual 2019 and 2020 competitions. Toben’s client, QT Hotels, approached them to redesign their “Rooftop at QT” bar brand since the new brand needed to work within the overall QT brand proposition of “celebrating individuality.” The main challenge was the creation of one brand with the added flexibility to make each location unique to reflect the individual spaces, experiences, and hotel narratives.

In order to accomplish this, Anackov and Kulp created a coherent master logo and graphic treatment that remains the same across all locations, while allowing each location’s individuality to shine through the imagery. The logo celebrates the rooftop location that all QT’s bars have in common, while the lenticular graphic treatment creates a sense of mystery and intrigue as well as a theme of abstraction and artfulness. QT Auckland was the first to implement the redesign into their rooftop bar, with Perth and Melbourne soon following. While none have been officially launched yet, the redesign is already proving to be both cost-effective and stylish without compromising customer experience or the QT brand.

Next up is “RAR Seen By…” (above), a collaborative design effort in Portugal that has spanned the last twenty-one years. The project has been ongoing since 2000, and was first led by designer João Nunes and curated by Miguel von Hafe Pérez and later Marta Moreira de Almeida. The continuing subject is RAR Holding Group, a sugar refinery business founded in 1962 by João Macedo Silva with an initial capital of 10 million escudos. Each year, an up-and-coming Portuguese designer is commissioned to create a piece of work that illustrates the RAR Group’s corporate activities. This year’s designer is Atelier Nunes e Pã, a design firm in Oporto, Portugal, that specializes in graphic, web, and production communication design and has earned awards such as the Red Dot Design Awards. The designer’s finished work is used in RAR’s annual report, using visual communication to convey the artist’s view and making a unique piece of communication every year. The project has garnered international recognition from RedDot Design and the International Design Awards, as well as Graphis in our Annual Reports 2014-2016.

Can’t get enough? Check out these and other entries in our Design Annual 2022 competition by heading over to Graphis’ main website!