The Down Royal Racecourse has long been a stage for some of the most exciting spectacles in Northern Ireland, and this is exactly what we try to capture when we produce work for them.

One of the most exciting projects we have worked on with the team at Down Royal is their upcoming Festival of Racing, taking place on the 5th and 6th of November. This project was a culmination of joint efforts between the teams at Titanic Belfast and Victoria Square in getting us the source material to work with and us here at Kaizen Brand Evolution in bringing everything together into an informative and communicative piece of design.

We created the look and feel for the campaign with two goals in mind, and that was to excite and intrigue. The collage of images comes together to tell a story of equal parts, seamlessly joining The Down Royal Racecourse with the two main sponsors of the event, Titanic Belfast and Victoria Square. The horses jumping from one building to another are the visual link between the two giants of Northern Irish culture, and create a perfect basis to build our campaign upon. Once we had the visual style established, we started work on producing everything that was required for the event, from an in-depth festival brochure design, online and social media adverts right the way through to large format print campaigns that can be seen around Belfast and further afield.

The brochure consists of a full race schedule with an in-depth look at all the scheduled races and their individual history, as well as information and history about the racecourse itself. Information about the suites available for rent was also included, which rounded off the brochure brilliantly as a showcase of everything that The Down Royal Racecourse has to offer to its patrons.

We wanted the brochure to be indicative of the level of service and excellence that has come to be expected at the Racecourse, and as such we started from the ground up, crafting the look and feel for the typography and imagery by building a structured grid system with classic measurements, which all the content adheres to throughout the publication. Once we had established an appropriate grid we started looking at the typography itself, and decided upon a brilliantly characterful typeface called ‘Agenda’. This typeface takes its roots in the classic lines of the London underground typeface ‘Johnston’, so when looking at an institution like The Down Royal Racecourse, we thought this direction was definitely appropriate in terms of bringing an established feel to the publication.

This styling was then brought right across to all other materials required publicity of the event as well as for use during the event. The latter consisted of race-cards for individual events taking place during the festival, such as the Victoria Square Best Dressed Ladies Day competition as well as the first Grade one chase of the season in the British Isles. The messaging and offering was subtly changed in each printed material to attract the appropriate audience before being designed for double page spread adverts for print in The Ulster Tatler Magazine as well as the Northern Woman Magazine. These offerings were then crafted for use online on social media, but also on the extended network of advertising slots as supplied by the great team at Mirror Media, all coming together as a complete blanket campaign which covered all facets of the Northern Irish consumer market.

All in all, this project brought together the best aspects of the design industry – collaboration, creativity and coverage – and as such was an excellently rewarding project to work on.