HOSPITALITY: EVENT BRAND SYSTEM
Paramount Club
An inherited system, pushed until it could carry a black-tie anniversary.
ROLE
Brand design lead
CLIENT
Paramount Group Real Estate
VENUE
Paramount Club - 1301 Avenue of the Americas, New York
YEARS
2024-2026
SCOPE
Event creative · Print & digital signage · Sub-brand systems · Partner lockups · Photography direction · Motion & screen content · Email & social
TEAM
Sole designer on a small marketing team, the club's entire brand function
A portion of the Paramount Club calendar. Every piece is the same system — wordmark locked to the top, one image carrying the message, type set to be read on the move.
THE BRIEF
Paramount Club was the amenity club inside Paramount Group's Midtown portfolio — lounge, café, atrium, game room and wellness studio, open to anyone who worked in the building. A club like that lives on its calendar. If there is nothing on this week, there is no reason to come up.
That puts a standing demand on design: new creative every few days, across printed signage, digital screens, email and social, all of it needing to look like the same club. I didn't start this system. I inherited it, and the brief was to keep it running.
The marketing team was small, which meant I sat close to everything — programming, partnerships, member communications, how the rooms actually got used on a Tuesday. Designing for a club like this teaches you the business of running one, not just how it should look. Most of the judgment on this page came from that, not from the brief.
The reflex with an inherited system is to redraw it. I didn't. The bones were sound — a fixed wordmark position, one dominant image, a type hierarchy that reads at distance — and a rebuild would have spent a year of hard-won consistency to buy a cosmetic win.
So I left the frame alone and worked on the two things that actually set the ceiling: the pictures inside it, and how far it could stretch. Over fifty events came through that frame — tastings, tournaments, residencies, holidays, partner activations, a comedy night, a first anniversary — without the system being replaced once.
THE MOVE
The atrium screen during the tournament: the same event creative, built for the room rather than the wall.
THE PHOTOGRAPHY
The club had little photography of its own. Every event had to be illustrated with a stock image which is why the creative described events instead of showing this one. I pushed to put a photographer at events. It wasn't in the budget and it wasn't anyone's ask, it was an argument I kept making until it happened. Within a season the club had a library of its own rooms, its own bartenders, its own crowd. That single operational change did more for how the brand felt than any typographic decision I could have made.
THE ANNIVERSARY
The one night that didn’t have to look like the other events.
The Caviar, Cocktails and Champagne invitation for the Paramount Club first anniversary.
Everything else on the digital signs is a fast read, someone passing a sign on the way to the elevator, three seconds, maybe four. The first anniversary wasn't that. It was an invitation. People were deciding whether to dress for it, and the creative had to carry that decision.
So the piece breaks the system on purpose. The sans headline gives way to a script font. The image drops to near-black and the only color left in the frame is candlelight on glass. The wordmark stays exactly where it always sits, which is what keeps it the club, and not a different brand.
It moved the register from come to the café to you're invited, and it became the reference the club's creative worked toward afterwards.
Partner activations and sub-brand work: Paramount Wellness residencies, Rooftop Garden Cooking Class and a Sir Davis whisky tasting
A system earns its keep when it stretches without tearing. The same frame carried a month-long tournament campaign across print, café and screen; partner activations that had to give a third party real estate without surrendering the club's voice; and a wellness sub-brand with a register of its own.
THE RANGE
One campaign, three placements: Café promotion, RSVP for Trivia Night, game-day screen.
50
0
rebuilds, evolved, never replaced
in-house photo library, built from nothing
events carried on one system