When Exotic Plaza approached us at DjayStudio to develop the identities for Miss Exotic Plaza and Exotic Plaza Talent Voice, the task went beyond designing two attractive event logos. These were emerging signature events for a hotel that was positioning itself as a destination for entertainment, pageantry, live experiences, and to draw in new markets and visitors.
The challenge was not simply to make two logos look good.
It was to give each event a visual identity strong enough to stand on its own, while still feeling connected to the hotel. These are Two Events with Two Personalities. Although they share the Exotic Plaza name, the two events speak to different experiences.
After a discovery meeting with the Exotic Plaza team, we highlighted the fact that both events had to follow the hotel's brand guidelines, but we were given some creative freedom to make reasonable tweaks and changes.
Miss Exotic Plaza
For Miss Exotic Plaza, the starting point was the role of the woman who would eventually wear the crown. The winner isn't simply the face of a competition. She becomes an Exotic Plaza Brand Ambassador, someone expected to carry the spirit of the hotel beyond the event itself.
And that led us to the idea of the female silhouette with open arms. The gesture speaks to confidence, presence, and openness, but most importantly, it reflects the hospitality at the heart of Exotic Plaza. The Miss becomes almost an extension of that hospitality, welcoming, representing and carrying the Exotic spirit wherever she goes.
Then we looked inward. Within the hotel is a powerful painting of an African female warrior. It became an unexpected source of inspiration for the identity.
We translated elements of that visual language into the African-inspired stripes surrounding the silhouette. This gave the logo something more meaningful than a decorative African reference. It connected the pageant to a physical part of the hotel's own story.
The identity could therefore speak about beauty and elegance without losing its sense of place.
Exotic Plaza Talent Voice
Exotic Plaza Talent Voice needed a different language. Where Miss Exotic Plaza is about presence, elegance and representation, Talent Voice is about performance, expression and discovering talent. The competition itself is structured around finding performers, developing them through coaching and eventually putting them on the biggest stage of the event.
So we stripped the idea back to its essentials.
A wordmark paired with a microphone became the foundation of the identity. The microphone immediately establishes the connection to voice and performance, while the wordmark keeps the identity simple, confident, and easy to recognize.
There was no need to overcomplicate the idea because sometimes the strongest identity is the one that knows exactly what it needs to say, so we didn't want to build a complicated symbol that would compete with the performers themselves. The identity also needed to work across everything from promotional materials to the physical event environment while remaining instantly associated with Talent Voice.
Once the two identities were established, we extended them into complete visual systems.
We developed the brand guidelines, marketing materials, main event flyers, supporting promotional flyers, wall posters and roll-ups for both events. This was important because an event identity doesn't live in one logo. It lives on the announcement that introduces the event, the flyer that gets shared, the poster people see on the street, the roll-up they encounter at the venue and eventually the stage itself.
Every touchpoint had to feel like part of the same story.
One of the biggest challenges in event branding is differentiation. Beauty pageants and talent competitions already come with familiar visual language. Crowns, glamorous typography, microphones, and dramatic graphics can make different events begin to look remarkably similar.
We wanted to move beyond that. For Miss Exotic Plaza, the identity came from the relationship between the woman, hospitality, and the African character of Exotic Plaza.
For Talent Voice, it came from the simplest expression of voice and performance. Two different approaches, but one objective: create identities that people could recognize without having to be told what they were looking at.
That is ultimately what DjayStudio set out to achieve with this project. Not just event graphics. Not just two logos. But two visual identities with the potential to become part of the memory and personality of Exotic Plaza's events.
Because an event can happen once, but when the identity is right, people remember it long after the lights go down.
Looking to build an event brand people remember?
At DjayStudio, we develop brand identities that turn ideas, experiences and events into recognizable visual brands. Let's build something people remember.
