Taking the
The hotel industry is packed with use of type, from the billboards, to the advertisements, down to the numbers on the hotel elevator buttons. Type is used in the hotel industry to add a finishing touch to a design, sometimes this is done well, and sometimes this is done completely wrong. No other location in the world has more examples of this other than Las Vegas, Nevada. Every one of the hotels on the strip has been designed to attract potential customers, these customers are all looking for something different when they come and few other places in the world have the variety that Las Vegas has. Whether it is the high-end resorts such as the Wynn and Encore, Bellagio, or Cosmopolitan at city center, the hotels catering to a younger hip crowd like the Palms, or the Hard Rock, or it might be the more family friendly hotels such as New
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York New York, or Paris Hilton. All of these resorts have been designed to attract these customers, and their use of type is prevalent in every aspect. Las Vegas is such a unique place because of the attention to detail that is given to the resorts small details regardless of how classy the hotel might be. The Wynn Casino and Hotel is known for its luxury, Wynn features approximately 2,716 hotel rooms and suites and Encore features 2,034, with over the top shopping in the hotel that includes 100,000 square feet of retail space includes boutiques from Alexander McQueen, Brioni, Cartier, Chanel, Dior, Graff, Hermès, Loro Piana, Louis Vuitton, Manolo Blahnik, Oscar de la RentaIts lush greenery with picturesque waterfalls, indoor gardens, art adorned walls, mosaic tile floors, scream high class There are wedding chapels, a Tom Fazio designed 18-hole golf course and more than 260,000 square feet of meet-
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ing space., Nothing has been overlooked in the design of the hotel, from the placement of each tree and shrub, to the chauffeur, to the floral smell of the lobby when guests first enter. The Wynn is an ideal example of the environments that can be created by design. When thinking of other high class hotels, some different ideas probably come to mind, ornate hand carved detailing, or Ritzy serif fonts, But at Wynn, the font used for the name of the hotel had to be carefully thought out, a serif font would have been too overpowering for the hotels already over the top display of wealth, whereas a sans serif font would have been too contemporary and pushed away the older more established clientele that the Wynn was catering to, but the simplicity of a sans serif font was needed to be appealing to other demographics. In the end, the use of Steve Wynn’s signature was an ideal compromise in the search for finding the perfect font and in this case logo for
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the hotel. The simple hand drawn Wynn that adorns the hotels golden tower is the perfect complement to the extremely high end hotel, it adds to the overall flavor of the hotel, giving viewers a change from the usual heavy Serif fonts and signs they see on other golden sleek hotels such as Trump International Hotel that is located directly across the street from the Wynn. The Wynn wanted to have a balance of both glamour and luxury, but also the designers didn’t want to push any other potential customers away purely based on a sign that would seem out of the league of most people that visit Vegas. This use of Steve Wynn’s signature as a logo for the hotel changed the way that high end hotels thought about branding. Gone was the idea that in order to be a high-end hotel, you had to use a certain set of rules and abide by them strictly, the new era of high end hotels is here.
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