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New Work: Weddings at The Chase

Weddings at The Chase Park Plaza

Our longtime client The Chase Park Plaza — a storied luxury hotel here in St. Louis — came to us with a fun new project: Create a booklet about the Chase wedding experience, from the history to the romance to the beauty.

We’re very familiar with the Chase brand, but every project benefits from fresh research and first-hand observation. So our team working on the brochure’s concepting, writing, design, and select photography toured the great range of wedding spaces with the Chase team, hearing both decades-old stories and fresh insights about what today’s couples and their families are seeking.

The finished 24-page booklet recently came off the press, and we’re pretty psyched with the results. The piece tells a comprehensive story of The Chase as an historic yet contemporary site for these celebrations, yet it retains an understated sophistication and elegance befitting the landmark.

Many wedding brochures crowd their covers with photography — we chose a typographic approach that was quietly self-assured, the age-old “Something” maxim bringing to mind the historic architecture and legacy of the Chase (something old), the Chase’s flexibility in accommodating the modern tastes of today’s brides (something new), and the Chase’s brand color (something blue). We printed the cover on Neenah Classic Crest Windsor Blue, which matched the lighter shade of the Chase blue the hotel uses on its business cards.

Our design team had a lot of fun choosing the foil for the cover. We printed the smaller edge details in gold metallic ink, then selected a gold foil that matches the Pearlized Cocoa flysheet you’ll see a few images down. We also chose a specific pale blue color for the “something blue” phrase — the blue foil there changes hue as you move it in the light. Here’s a closer shot of just the cover typography:

For the flysheet, we wanted to add what one of our designers called “a layer of loveliness” without doing the typical vellum sheet:

We used Neenah Esse Pearlized Cocoa on the above flysheet, as it offers a beautiful, warm, and rich metallic-looking sheet without becoming cloying, as happens with other, more yellowish-gold sheets.

While this booklet is meant for today’s couples and families, we sought through our storytelling to place their potential experience within the larger Chase history. Discovering what it means to be “a Chase bride” involves both looking back and looking forward.

We printed the booklet’s inside pages using 5/5 (4-color process plus a spot color). We used a warm gray spot color for the typography to ensure legibility, while keeping the central type a soft warm brown color — rather than stark black type against white paper.

A few additional spreads:

Our thanks to The Chase Park Plaza team for bringing to completion another great project. For those interested in picking up a copy of the booklet, just stop by The Chase Park Plaza.

While TOKY shot several of the booklet’s photos, we are pleased to credit Stephen Seebeck Photography for the couple on the staircase at top, and Patti Gabriel Photography for the above couple on a Chase terrace.

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Written by Stephen Schenkenberg

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