Toast Martinborough

We started working with Toast on the 2019 event. The brief for the design was to express some key aspects of the festival experience, sophistication and wine, and reflect the fashion focus of the day to appeal to the target audience of females who come to Toast with groups of friends.    

The poster design celebrates New Zealand’s most iconic wine and food festival with a striking, sophisticated, contemporary and very iconic design that captures the theme of like great wine, Toast Martinborough gets better with age. We added a fashion feel through the combination of red lips, elegant features, colour palette and beautiful curves of the hat adding to the fashion feel as well as the sunny nature of experiencing the festival in the spring sunshine.

In 2020 the brief was to continue the theme: Just like a great wine, Toast Martinborough gets better with age and build on from last year’s fashion theme but take it up a notch, expressing elegance, style, sophistication and contemporary. As Toast combines the very best wine, food and music amongst the vines we came up with an illustration that still features a elegant, stylish, fashion focused woman wearing sunglasses that features the event experience in the reflection of the glasses. We showcase the social nature of the event by showing three people, with the male eating, a woman drinking wine and a woman singing to express the three key components of Toast. They are set amongst the vines as well as the iconic Martinborough hills behind. We were then able to pull each character out separately when required.

We worked with Toast on all print and digital collateral required for the extensive range of marketing channels. We also designed a new app for all the essential information at your fingertips including wine, food and music menus, telling festival goers which vineyards are ‘pumpin’ or ‘chillin’ and a real time buses tracker. 

This year Toast Martinborough is embarking on a new era of growth and evolution and their brand identity needs to reflect how Toast is transforming from the one-day celebration into a weekend-long festival that will include a series of pop-up events in Martinborough. They need an on-going brand identity that captures the origin and evolution of Toast Martinborough and reflects their vision.

We developed a new brand story, brand proposition, logo and visual identity system and guidelines to carry Toast Martinborough into the future. These new tools help express the unique festival experience, guiding the audience to encourage curiosity and a thirst for knowledge, new tastes, flavours and experiences.

The new brand story captures this perfectly. When you consider all the things that make Toast Martinborough the festival that it is, you could say that it has a distinctive flavour of its own.

Let the taste of world-class wines pique your curiosity. You can wander through the vines reconnecting with lifelong friends or forging new friendships as you share incredible food crafted with passion and artistry. Sit back and soak up the atmosphere, go on a journey of discovery, or lose yourself in the beats and tunes. Whatever way you do it, savour the flavour of Toast Martinborough.

The new logo visually expresses excellence and the exceptional qualities of our boutique wine village by combining a nod to the legacy of the festival through serif type with sophisticated and modern refinement and a touch of craftsmanship as it celebrates Martinborough’s artfully crafted produce. 

Illustrations are a graphic element that features predominately in our visual identity system. They represent the distinctive flavour of Toast and encourage curiosity and discovery. The illustration style uses simple, geometric shapes to create objects and uses texture to add depth and visual interest. This style establishes a base for future campaigns where new illustrations can be created to ensure the brand feels fresh and original while recognisably Toast.  

The Toast colour palette expresses savouring the flavour of Toast Martinborough as it captures the colours of our world-class wines, food and festival experience in the sunshine, amoungst the vines. The colour palette creates a framework for future campaigns where any combination of colours can be used to ensure the brand feels fresh and original while always recognisably Toast.