How to Hire a Hotel Brand Designer: What to Look For and What to Ask

You've decided your hotel needs brand work, and you've decided to hire a designer rather than an agency. Now comes the part nobody writes about honestly: actually choosing one, and setting the project up so it doesn't go sideways.

The short version: most hotel branding projects that go wrong were mis-scoped before a single design was made — not badly designed. The designer you pick matters. What you agree before they start matters more.

Here's how to do both properly.

First, decide what you're actually hiring for

"We need branding" covers at least three different jobs, with very different costs and timelines:

A brand identity — the foundation. Positioning, logo, colour, typography, photography direction, tone of voice, and the brand book that holds it together.
Collateral — menus, signage, room directories, spa price lists, key card sleeves, brochures. Design applied to specific things you need printed or produced.
Ongoing marketing design — social content, campaign creative, OTA and ad visuals. A rolling relationship, not a project.

A designer can do all three. What they can't do is quote for one when you meant another. If you brief "we need a new look" and you really meant "we need forty pieces of collateral by April", you'll get a proposal that fits neither.

Work out which of the three you need — it may genuinely be all three, in sequence — before you approach anyone.

How to read a design portfolio properly

Everyone tells you to look at the portfolio. Almost nobody tells you what you're looking for. A portfolio of beautiful images proves someone has taste. It doesn't prove they can solve your problem.

Three things to look for, in order:

Range within one project, not range across many. Ten different logos for ten different clients tells you very little. One project shown properly — the mark, the colour system, how it behaves on a menu, a sign, a website, an Instagram grid — tells you whether they can hold an identity together across everything a hotel actually needs. Hotels are a breadth problem. A designer who only shows logos has only solved the easy part.

Evidence of hospitality thinking. Look for the unglamorous items: signage, wayfinding, menus, welcome cards, OTA-sized crops. These are the things a hotel lives on daily, and they're the first thing a designer without hospitality experience gets wrong — because they design for a screen, not for a printed A4 menu that gets reprinted weekly by the property's own staff on their own printer.

Reasoning, not just results. The better portfolios explain what the property was, who it needed to attract, and why the design went the way it did. A designer who can articulate that on past work will do it on yours. One who only shows finished images may have been executing someone else's thinking.

If a designer's work is beautiful but all e-commerce and tech, you're not hiring a hospitality specialist — you're hiring a talented generalist who will learn hospitality on your budget. That can work. Just price it honestly, and read the specialist argument in full before you decide.

Five questions worth asking

You don't need a long interview. You need five answers.

"Walk me through a hotel project from brief to handover." You're listening for a process — research, positioning, concepts, refinement, application, handover — not just "I design, you approve."
"What would you need from us to start?" A designer who wants your occupancy patterns, your guest mix, your competitive set and your ADR is thinking commercially. One who only wants your logo files is thinking decoratively.
"What's included, and what's extra?" Rounds of revision, number of concepts, file formats, print-ready artwork, future amends. Vagueness here is the single most reliable predictor of a difficult project.
"Who owns the final files?" The answer should be: you do, outright, including editable source files and licensed or licensable fonts. Get it in writing.
"What have you done when a client didn't like the first direction?" Every honest designer has a story. The answer tells you how they handle disagreement — which you will have at some point.

What to put in your brief

The most common worry hoteliers have is that they don't know enough about design to write a brief. You don't need to. A brief isn't a design instruction — it's a description of your business.

But there is one thing only you can bring, and no designer can supply it for you: the message. "Design me a nice menu" isn't a brief. What is this menu meant to say about the property? What should a guest feel reading it?

A designer's job is to build the perfect expression of your message. Deciding what that message is remains yours. When it's missing, the project doesn't stop — it just gets slower and more expensive, because the designer has to excavate it out of you through rounds of questions, and every gap left in that excavation is somewhere a misunderstanding can grow.

If you genuinely don't have the words yet, that's fine — you don't need a polished positioning statement. Collect a few examples from competitors you admire, note what you liked and what you didn't, and bring that. Rough material you actually mean beats a confident brief you don't.

What genuinely helps:

What the property actually is. Rooms, location, style, what makes a guest choose you over the place down the road.
Who you want to attract, and honestly, who currently books. Those are often different, and the gap is usually the whole point of the project.
Your competitive set — the three or four properties you lose bookings to.
What you already have and whether it's staying. An existing name, a heritage element, a building people recognise.
Where the brand has to work. Print, signage, digital, OTAs, and which languages. If you serve international guests, say so early — designing for multiple languages changes decisions about typography and layout from the start, and is expensive to retrofit.
Budget and deadline, real ones. Withholding a budget doesn't get you a better price; it gets you a proposal aimed at the wrong project.

What you don't need to supply: colours, fonts, or a description of the logo you have in mind. That's the part you're paying for.

Red flags

A price with no scope attached. A flat figure for "branding" with no definition of what's delivered is not a quote, it's a hook.
Portfolio work that can't be discussed. Some hospitality work sits under NDA and can't be named — that's normal and a good designer will say so plainly while still explaining the thinking. What isn't normal is being unable to describe the work at all.
No questions about your business. A designer who takes the brief and disappears is designing decoration.
Unlimited revisions. It sounds generous. It usually means no defined process, and projects with no defined end tend not to have one.
Stock-feeling concepts delivered very fast. Speed is not a virtue in isolation. Hotel identity that arrives in 48 hours generally arrived somewhere else first.

How the engagement should actually run

A sound hotel branding project has visible stages, and you should know which one you're in at all times:

Discovery — they learn the property and the market. Direction — a small number of considered routes, not a wall of options. Refinement — one route, developed properly, with defined revision rounds. Application — the identity built out across the things you actually use. Handover — final files, formats, and the brand book that lets other people apply it correctly after the designer has gone.

That last stage is the one hotels most often skip, and the one that decides whether the work survives. An identity with no rules drifts within a year — usually the moment a third party makes their first ad without them. If handover isn't in the proposal, ask for it.

Agree in writing, before starting: deliverables, revision rounds, timeline, payment stages, and file ownership. Not because you expect trouble — because writing it down is how you find out you and the designer pictured different projects, while it's still cheap to fix.

Your half of the job

One thing worth saying plainly, because it's the part hiring guides tend to leave out: the projects that go wrong usually aren't the ones with the wrong designer. They're the ones where only one side was really participating.

Communication runs both ways. A designer can ask good questions, chase decisions, and work hard to interpret vague feedback — but that effort doesn't substitute for your own input, and it never quite reaches the same result. Nobody knows your property, your guests and your market the way you do. When a client is unclear, or too busy to review work properly and give direct feedback, the designer ends up guessing at the very thing they were hired to express.

In practice, your half is small but non-negotiable: be clear about the message, respond to work within a sensible window, give feedback that says why rather than just yes or no, and put one person in charge of decisions. Projects with four occasional opinions and no decision-maker take twice as long and land somewhere nobody chose.

Where to start

Before you contact anyone, do the cheap diagnostic work yourself: run a brand audit on your own property so you arrive knowing what's actually broken. A hotelier who says "our identity is fine but nothing matches across channels" gets a sharper, cheaper proposal than one who says "we need branding."

Then look for the person, not the label. Hospitality experience, a portfolio that shows breadth rather than logos, a clear process, and a written scope.

Hire on process and evidence, not on the prettiest picture. The prettiest picture in a portfolio was made for someone else's hotel.

Elina Imre is a senior brand and graphic designer specialising in hotels and hospitality, working with properties across Europe in four languages. If you're planning brand work for your hotel, get in touch — or start with the complete guide to hotel brand identity.