If you’ve been drawn to W Hotels for your creative spirit in recent years, it’s because you’re the intended audience. Positioning itself as bold, colorful, and unapologetically fun, it was considered a trendsetter in luxury hospitality for the art and design community in the 2010s. However, times have changed. Competition is fiercer than ever, and preferences have evolved. Today, luxury no longer means ostentatious opulence but instead leans towards a more subtle and holistic experience.
To reflect this new direction, Porto Rocha has rebranded the hotel group under the concept of ‚Luxury, Liberated‘. This means moving beyond traditional symbols of status to create a lively yet refined system that can be scaled globally. By striking a balance between bold expression and intentional subtlety, Porto Rocha has crafted a new visual identity that resonates across W Hotel’s diverse properties worldwide.
The new branding aims to achieve two key goals: attracting new guests through eye-catching marketing and enhancing their experience once they’re on-site. This is achieved through a vibrant color palette, artistic photography, prominent typography, and impactful messaging in promotional materials. Inside the hotels, the brand expression shifts to a more subtle tone, with neutral colors and an emphasis on tactile materials.
Porto Rocha simplified the logo, information structure, and brand hierarchy while retaining the iconic ‚W‘ symbol. They created a unified wordmark integrated with the symbol, replacing the previous multi-font vertical lockup with a sleek ‚W HOTELS‘ design. The goal was to infuse the brand with confidence and flexibility, akin to a high-fashion logo.
A custom typeface, W Supreme, was developed in collaboration with Lineto to reflect the geometric characteristics of the logo. This typeface, complete with an Arabic script and alternate characters for Mandarin and Japanese, allows for consistent communication across languages without relying solely on the logo.
Color and imagery play a significant role in conveying the brand’s new vision of luxury. A diverse color palette was developed to replace the previous neon hues, maintaining the brand’s attitude while giving it a modern touch. Each location is assigned specific color combinations, and lifestyle imagery reflects local elements, such as white slopes for W Aspen and the famous boardwalk for W Barcelona.