Role & responsibility
Timeframe
October 2022 – January 2023
TEAM
1x Senior Designer
1x Junior Designer
1x Marketing Manager
SKILLS
Graphic design
Creative direction
Brand systems
Print design
Digital design
Stakeholder presentation
TOOLS
Overview
Chester Racecourse, founded in 1539, regularly hosts multiple race days amongst other events. Every year, the marketing team commissions a new “season concept” – essentially a full creative direction for the year. One cohesive look that would stretch across every race day, every campaign, and every asset: social media, 48-sheet billboards, email headers, on-site screens, badges, posters, racecards and more. With 22 race days and 212 assets per day, that’s close to 4,700+ individual pieces of content over a year.
As Senior Graphic Designer, I was responsible for creating the 2023 concept from scratch: developing the visual idea, testing it across asset types, and presenting it for approval before the junior designer helped roll it out across the full season.
Impact
The concept scaled across several campaigns with consistent execution throughout.
The asset-tracking framework I built remains an active team resource.
The junior designer delivered assets independently without needing intervention.
RESEARCH
Before generating any ideas, I spent time understanding what had worked in the past and what the brief was asking for. The previous year’s (2022) artwork had used diamonds as the cohesive shape across all fixtures – a clean, geometric approach that brought colour into designs without overpowering the photography.
The brief for 2023 needed to push further while following on naturally. Key objectives were clear:
The combination of sporty and social was an interesting creative challenge. Chester Racecourse isn’t just a race meeting, it’s a big day out. The visual language needed to carry both.
2022 Artwork
With the brief in mind, I started to look for inspiration for the new design. I looked at several reference points that ended up shaping the final concept: the image bank to see what kind of photography we had to use, sports event artwork which seemed like an obvious go-to, and movie posters.
While the latter isn’t particularly relevant, there was a distinct style which captures attention. Movie posters, particularly for epic, historical films, use a strong hierarchy of centred images with bold typography. It creates a sense of occasion and of something significant happening. Sports posters, particularly for football, do something similar: players overlaid on scenic backgrounds, imagery tinted in team colours to create a posterised feel. Both communicated exactly the energy Chester Racecourse needed – the spectacle of the sport, with a cinematic quality that reflected the venue’s history.
DESIGN DECISIONS
At this point in the process, two possible directions for the creative concept began to emerge.
Judging from the bank of in-house photography we had to play with. I was surprised how naturally colourful the horse racing industry is. The silks worn by the jockeys were already bright and bold, featuring geometric shapes and patterns that could be tied in nicely with the design.
My idea was to represent each race day with a different silk pattern – stripes, stars, polka dots, diamonds, crosses, etc. giving each fixture its own distinct visual identity. The silks felt like a genuinely original idea. They’re central to racing culture, immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with the sport, and lend themselves naturally to bold, graphic pattern work.
The second concept applied the movie poster and sports poster research more directly. The centrepiece of each fixture’s artwork would be a layered hierarchy of photography – horses, jockeys, racegoers – overlaid against a neutral background with scenic shots at a low opacity.
The cohesive “shape” tying it all together would be a bold colour splash – a smoke cloud style effect – drawn from the sporting world (think coloured smoke at a parade or celebration). This element could shift in size and colour across fixtures while remaining immediately recognisable as part of the same system.
ITERATIONS
I built out early versions of both directions to see how they worked as a whole before choosing a particular direction.
First was the jockey silks idea (as seen below). The direction had a strong visual in isolation. But when I began testing it across the full season – 22 race days, each with a different pattern – the problem became apparent. The range of shapes, colours and scales across the full set was too varied to feel like a single cohesive brand. It made the artwork feel inconsistent as a season-wide system. On top of that, when you added other vital info such as CTAs or sponsors’ logos, or you had to resize for smaller scales, such as badges, the design became a little too busy and overwhelming.
The movie poster direction, however, didn’t have that problem. The smoke effect gave every fixture the same visual anchor regardless of colour, and the layered photography created depth without introducing new variables. The system held together across formats and scaled cleanly from a badge to a 48-sheet billboard. It became the direction to develop.
PITCHING
With the jockey silks ruled out and the movie poster direction clearly the stronger concept, I presented it to the marketing manager for an initial sign-off before investing time in the full system.
The response was broadly positive, but he had one concern: the smoke effect felt too soft. After a year of sharp, geometric diamonds, he worried that an organic shape wouldn’t have a strong enough presence or it would lack the visual punch the 2022 artwork had. It was a fair challenge. However, the “softness” of the smoke worked in our favour instead of against us. This season’s shape being versatile and fluid meant it was flexible and easier to adapt to assets of all sizes and types, from angular race cards to circular badges. Harder geometric shapes would be more difficult to translate.
Rather than argue this case, I went away and created 10 more fixture assets – showing different colours, different photography, different formats – to show how the concept performed as a set. Seeing many fixtures side by side made the logic of the system clear: the smoke effect wasn’t the hero, it was the thread. The photography and colour carried the visual weight; the smoke gave it consistency. With that context, the concern resolved itself. He signed off the direction and forward to other department heads who were all aligned on the direction.
CHALLENGES
The main challenge on this project wasn’t creative, it was operational. Nearly 4,700 assets over a year, with only two designers (me and the junior), meant the design had to be quick and easy to apply consistently to multiple assets of all shapes and sizes. On top of this, when I joined there was no master document tracking which assets needed to be created for each fixture – remarkable given the volume of work involved. Everything had been managed on a case-by-case basis with no standardised system, which left real room for things to slip through or be duplicated. I took on a project manager role here and built a spreadsheet from scratch listing every asset, its dimensions, and its status, so we could always keep track of what had been done and what was outstanding. It’s still in use today.
DESIGN
With creative direction signed-off and the process documented, the fun part of ironing out the design details could begin. I worked through every dimension of the concept to build a full system finalising brand details, including type, colours and photography guidelines.
I carried over Bebas Neue from the 2022 season. As so much of the design had changed, this allowed a sense of continuity and avoided too much of a jump from the previous design. Fixture names would be set large and bold; the season strapline “Experience the Thrill” in a lighter weight beneath.
I assigned a distinct colour to each of the 22 race days, designed so that when all of them sat together they formed a natural spectrum from the start of the season to the end – lighter, brighter shades in spring and summer, deeper and earthier tones moving into autumn.
The major sponsored campaigns each had their own separate palette: bold primaries for the On Sale campaign, Boodles blush pink for the May Festival, complementary blues and purples for Racing Fridays, autumnal reds and oranges to close the season.
Each fixture’s hero image used a layered approach: 2-3 main subjects in both full colour and monochrome (jockey, horse, or racegoer) over a low-opacity scenic background (this usually showed the racing grounds). This created visual depth without introducing new shapes or colours that would compete with the smoke effect or the typography.
The smoke splash was the shape that unified the whole system. It could increase or decrease in scale depending on the format, shift colour by fixture, and sit either behind or in front of the photography depending on composition. Its flexibility was what made it work at both badge size and billboard size without needing to be redesigned.
Final Design
The completed concept was used across multiple fixtures and translated onto many digital and print assets, including 48-sheet billboards, website headers, Instagram assets, on-site screens, racecards, and badges. This new design held up at every scale.
ON SALE CAMPAIGN
VARIOUS FIXTURES
BOODLES MAY FESTIVAL ASSETS
OUTCOME
The concept ran untouched for a full season, 22 racedays, 7 campaigns, ~4,700 assets with 0
changes after sign-off.
The asset tracking spreadsheet I created from scratch helped the team to the extent that it is still in active use today.
The junior designer applied the concept across the full asset range independently, with no need for creative intervention
Heads of all the different departments within the company were happy with the creative direction.
LEARNINGS
The jockey silks direction is the clearest example of this. The concept was genuinely interesting and specific to racing in a way I’m still proud of as an idea. But it couldn’t function as a multiple-asset system because of how heavily it relies on variety. With design work such as this, I learnt it’s important to create multiple mock ups at the beginning to see how they interact instead of just relying on one. It’s about how the hundredth piece looks when it sits next to the first.
Creative work at this volume relies on infrastructure. Inheriting a team with no asset tracking system made that immediately clear. Building the spreadsheet wasn’t a side task; it was what made the creative work possible to execute reliably. Good process doesn’t slow things down at scale, it’s the only thing that keeps them moving.
Leading a junior designer through a rollout of this scale taught me that ambiguity in a design system costs time in the long run. Every decision I left open, even slightly, became a question I had to answer later, or worse, an inconsistency I had to correct. The discipline of designing a system that someone else can execute without interpretation is different to designing for yourself, and it made me a more rigorous designer.
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