ZIP by Premier Inn
A bold yet friendly no-frills font for ZIP, a new kind of budget hotel. Our type design mirrored the direct, pared-down language used in the brand identity.
Wayfinding
The challenge for ZIP was to develop a font that fully embodied the simple, no faff mentality of the hotel but was also really hard-working as we knew the brand would be very typographical. The font F37 developed not only amply met those requirements but also quickly became the beating heart of the visual brand.
Dan Wilkinson — Senior Creative Manager, Premier Inn
Room key
Background
ZIP by Premier Inn is a new kind of hotel from Whitbread, the UK’s largest hospitality company. The idea is simple. Do the essentials brilliantly, then take away everything else. You get a small room (8.5 sq m), a simple stay and best of all, a price to match – from £19 a night. Branding agency Wolff Olins got the nod to create the new brand’s look and feel.
Wolff Olins’s proposed identity used pared-down language, presenting a fresh take on budget hotels. It was simple, striking and typographically led. We were asked to mirror that in our font design, and to be as functional as possible with the elements used to construct the letterforms.
Signage
In-room branded items
Delivery
Working alongside Wolff Olins, we designed a bespoke, no-frills font for ZIP. It feels confident and bold, while the circular tittles add friendliness.
It’s super functional too — we designed matching arrows, coded into the font, which appear in the hotels’ signage. Our aim was to achieve maximum impact through simplicity.
Weights
