Signature Dining, Japan

The same IHG dining membership across four Japanese hotels - each with its own site, card and collateral, localised into Japanese.

Group: InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)
Hotels: ANA Crowne Plaza Sapporo; ANA Crowne Plaza Osaka; ANA Crowne Plaza Chitose; InterContinental Osaka
Programme: Signature Dining (シグネチャーダイニング)
Role: Designer and front-end developer
Scope: Collateral, responsive websites and members’ portals, EDMs
Focus: Restaurants and bars

The Japanese-language Signature Dining site for ANA Crowne Plaza Sapporo

The programme

Signature Dining is IHG’s food-and-beverage membership - InterContinental Hotels Group, the owner of InterContinental, Crowne Plaza and ANA Crowne Plaza among others. It is one programme rolled out property by property: each hotel gets its own site, its own card and its own campaign calendar, all recognisably the same thing.

Japan was four hotels - three ANA Crowne Plaza properties and one InterContinental - each localised into Japanese, with the script logotype carried across unchanged and everything around it rebuilt for a different language and a different set of restaurants.

What I did

Per hotel: the collateral, the website and the email campaigns. I designed the sites and built them myself, responsive, in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, each with a members’ portal behind the public pages.

The constraint that shaped all of it was type. A layout set for English does not survive Japanese - line breaks, character width and the absence of italics all change what the design can lean on - so the grid had to hold two writing systems without either looking like the afterthought.

Sapporo and Osaka

Two ANA Crowne Plaza properties, each with its own card, collateral and Japanese-language site on the shared template.

Signature Dining membership card for ANA Crowne Plaza Sapporo — **Sapporo** - the card, in ANA Crowne Plaza’s magenta. The script mark is the one fixed element across every property in the programme.

The Signature Dining site for ANA Crowne Plaza Osaka — **Osaka** - the hotel’s own site, on the same template with a different restaurant list.

Membership envelope for ANA Crowne Plaza Osaka — **Osaka** - the welcome envelope, the first physical thing a new member receives and the piece that has to make a free membership feel like an invitation.

Signature Dining certificate for ANA Crowne Plaza Sapporo — **Sapporo** - certificates, set in Japanese against the same grid as the Sydney equivalents.

ANA Crowne Plaza Chitose

The site, and the campaign emails that ran off it.

Signature Dining campaign email for ANA Crowne Plaza Chitose — Campaign emails for Chitose, hand-coded like the rest and checked on mobile before every send.

InterContinental Osaka

The one InterContinental in the Japanese set - a different brand under the same group, so the programme keeps its script mark but drops ANA’s magenta for InterContinental’s gold.

The Signature Dining site for InterContinental Osaka — Osaka’s site, with the card of choice and the hotel’s own cellar as photography.

Production artwork for the InterContinental Osaka membership wallet — Production artwork for the Osaka wallet - trim, fold and the hotel’s address set in Japanese on the reverse.

Also in the group: InterContinental Hong Kong

The same job ran at InterContinental Hong Kong under its own name, ICHK Dining - a membership across Yan Toh Heen, The Steak House, Harbourside, Lobby Lounge, Spoon by Alain Ducasse and Nobu, in English and Chinese.

Membership pack artwork for ICHK Dining at InterContinental Hong Kong — The Hong Kong membership pack, set in English and Chinese. Six restaurants, one enclosure, and a die-cut that had to survive being posted.

Outcome

Four Japanese hotels live on the same programme, each with its own site, card and calendar, plus the Hong Kong equivalent under its own name.

Taken with the two Sydney hotels, that is seven IHG properties across three countries running one dining membership - built as a system that survives translation, not as seven separate jobs.