V+ Karaoke

I was brought in for a full visual language overhaul and the collateral that runs on it: menus, business cards, promotional posters and in-store signage, each one meant to carry the experience rather than just label it.

Two constraints shaped everything. The identity had to read as premium, and every asset had to work in English and Chinese without either language feeling like the afterthought.

The original palette paired black with a bright yellow and a saturated purple. It conveyed boldness and playfulness (genuinely, it was doing something), but it wasn't the something the venue was selling. The combination read closer to arcade than lounge, and it diluted the sense of exclusivity and refinement a premium room depends on.

The logo had a second problem: nothing about it identified the business as karaoke. A guest seeing it cold had no way to know what the venue was.

The palette shifted to a deep charcoal ground with a yellow-to-gold gradient running through it. Gold does the work the bright yellow couldn't: it reads as prestige rather than energy. The dark ground grounds the whole system in the low light the venue actually operates in.

For the mark itself, the client brought stylistic references and one firm requirement: the plus had to stay a star. That constraint turned out to be useful. It gave the redesign a fixed point to build continuity around, so the refinement reads as the same brand growing up rather than a replacement.

I started with layout sketches to settle structure and reading order, then moved into digital mockups built for print. Gold on near-black is exactly the combination that looks beautiful on a monitor and disappears under lounge lighting, so the layout couldn't be signed off on screen.

Multiple iterations were printed and tested in the actual room, adjusting spacing, type size and contrast until the pages held up in the light they'd really be read in.

The print collateral is read from a distance (reception displays and a standing banner), so it leans on vertical layout, larger type, generous spacing and gold accents to stay legible across the room.

The social side is the opposite problem. Instagram carousels are read at arm's length and in motion, so I structured them as swipeable sequences with one benefit of the membership per card, rather than compressing the whole offer into a single dense frame.

Designing bilingually pushed me to think much harder about type and layout than a single-language brand would have. When two scripts have to carry equal weight, you stop treating typography as a style choice and start treating it as a structural one.

The other lasting lesson was about testing in context. Checking readability in low light, and adjusting based on how people physically handled the materials, caught problems that no amount of on-screen review would have surfaced.

It's the project that sharpened my understanding of how design can elevate an everyday experience, and it built skills I keep using: flexible brand systems, and designing for real physical spaces rather than just screens.