Custom design signage in Dubai for real estate and leisure business KOA
Richard Chapman
Specialist in brand and web design for financial services, interior design and real estate firms
Driving through the bright sunshine and sandy tones of eastern Dubai, with the bulk of that coastline city behind you, there’s a new resort being built along the road into the neighbourhood of Al Barari.
Leaving the highway, drivers approach the gates of lifestyle business KOA with its hotel, apartments, co-working space and LOWE restaurant. Along the roadside, shielding the construction site, are fifty massive banners, four metres square, that form a striking and elegant ‘graphic strip’ that offers a taste of things to come.
We’re proud to say we not only designed the branding but art directed the photography of indigenous plants that is featured on this custom design signage so close to the heart of Dubai.
Sign of the times
The background to the project is a photo shoot we completed in October 2022 as we began the KOA brand design brief. Earlier that summer I had pitched the idea of custom brand photography for the website project, and the team at KOA loved the idea, to my delight suggesting I fly out to direct the shots. In a post earlier this year I described the extraordinary circumstances of completing this shoot. The heat, thinking about what we’d shoot for these pictures in real time, the camera breaking down in 42º, pivoting to working in the on-site studio… you name it (there was quite the story). It was a genuinely extraordinary experience.
When the website was being completed, we applied our textural shots in a secondary way, using them for the trims and edges of the sites, which worked well as over the years I’ve always appreciated a resource of that kind. The vast majority of the imagery used on the site was incredible images of a range of stunning KOA developments, from a significant shoot the team completed. It’s particularly thrilling to see both this extraordinary architecture alongside the attitude and creative direction in the photography in the context of our graphic design work for real estate firms.
Looking at it again, a few months after launch, I am so proud of the KOA brand, icon and logo design as well as the site we devised and built. The shots taken here are used in areas such as a ‘call to action’ and trims of the pages providing texture throughout. Designing for KOA – as well as the art direction of those shots – has been an amazing experience and the end results work really well in situ alongside the primary pictures of KOA developments.
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I think it’s a sign
However it was earlier this summer, some 18 months after the original shots had been completed and a few months after the new KOA website had gone live, as well as its sibling sites for KONO Contracting and M1 Utilities, that the images had an unexpected second life.
After the KOA site was finished, the team had been working extensively on their Instagram feed. This took shape in the form of a beautiful new programme of visuals which were tonally rich and cohesive, sitting together in a distinctive, elegant style. The new social media work looks great – and by pleasing coincidence, our shots from October 2022 worked perfectly alongside this emerging new style.
So when KOA broke ground on the new resort, this new signage brief came up and the idea of using the photos in large format was born. Given how much I’d loved the original shots and that their purpose had always been digital, the idea that they might be used on site in Al Barari, such a short distance where they were taken, was incredibly satisfying.
I am writing these words having visited KOA again, indeed I took the photos in this post from a series of vantage points alongside the resort site. Seeing the pictures from our shoot that day turned into custom design signage in Dubai was a fantastic experience.