The National Care Home Open Day is a celebration of care homes aiming to create links between care homes and their local communities. The National Association for the Provision of Activities for Older People (NAPA) set annual challenges to care homes, to help raise activity standards.
This year, Caring Homes group homes took part in the Best Tea Party Ever challenge, and hoped to bring it all together with the help of the Caring Homes Bake-Off. We were briefed to create a starter pack for the organisers of events in individual homes, to be distributed to each care home within 4 weeks.
mark-making* proposed the starter pack to include logos, poster templates, invitation templates, introductory booklet, bake-off booklet, bake-off logos, bake-off posters, how-to guide, and a cookbook of favourite recipes collected from residents.
We also proposed a Tumblr website, where all entries, recipes, and pictures from the events could be showcased and discussed, to create a legacy. After discussion, the agreed solution was one comprehensive booklet combining all the essential information about both the Caring Homes Bake-Off, and the Best Tea Party Ever.
The design for the logo was a modern take on a vintage tea label, using bold, traditional typography in keeping with the overall theme. It also features a teapot icon encasing the Caring Homes flower symbol.
An initial content framework for a 20pp booklet was proposed and approved. The booklet was progressed to the logo and print design stage, where the focus was on a traditional theme, creating a simple, fun, and accessible look and feel.
Features included hand-drawn cupcakes, teapots and bunting, along with bespoke poster templates. The colour palette comprised muted pinks and blues, to give it that traditional vintage feel, accompanied with classic tea party imagery.
A rework was required after some wholesale changes to the content. This included suggested party theme pages including Teddy Bears’ Picnic, Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and Vintage Chic. After careful copy editing, the new content was paginated at 24pp. The available imagery was limited; with diligent searching, appropriate images were found, still maintaining the strong traditional look and feel.
The completed booklet is a visually attractive piece of print, which is valuable and useful to each care home. The event took place on 20th June: we are looking forward to seeing some great Caring homes PR as a result.