The Bloody Good Dinner—The Fire One

Town Square was tasked with positioning The Bloody Good Dinner as a world-class, must-attend event in Melbourne’s cultural and culinary calendar. The challenge was to articulate a bold and unique vision for the event’s 2019 iteration—an identity design and thematic framework that surprised and intrigued, capturing the imagination of audiences and evoking the vibrant, contemporary barbeque offering of Burnt Ends.

The result was The Fire One, a typographic and image-led identity and a crafted, fully-immersive dining experience where beauty meets chaos, and the energy, destruction and magic of the burning flame is countered with elegance and a delicate refinement.

At the heart of The Bloody Good Dinner is the need to address urgent funding gaps and raise funds for vital research into new treatments to improve the lives and health outcomes of Australians affected by bone marrow failure and blood cancers. The design helped impact this by:

• Elevating the event into the mainstream through PR in major Australian media publications
• Selling 623 $500 tickets, significantly surpassing all sales objectives
• Raising over $800,000 in one night
• Receiving over $450,000 of pro bono services to run the event
• Further reinforcing the event as the must-attend charity event of Melbournians’ social calendar

The creative partnership between The Bloody Good Dinner and Town Square has established a collaborative, design-led approach to the annual fundraising event.

Embracing a dynamic and shifting identity design strategy enables The Bloody Good Dinner and Town Square to transform and re-energise the event each year, designing remarkable and unique dining experiences. This approach has created a highly anticipated fundraising event that inspires and motivates guests to support those affected by bone marrow failure and blood cancers.

We collaborated with photographer Mark Roper and stylist Tamara Maynes from Hart & Co. to create a series of images that would be used across the 2019 identity. The result was a suite of unexpected, evocative and striking imagery central to the identity design.

Working in partnership with the event team, a holistic design-driven approach was adopted and embraced. Every design touchpoint was considered, with communications, environment design and brand experience completely integrated to transport guests into another world.

The design response and brand narrative embodies the duality of the refined and the primal, and the tension between the light and the dark. Drawing inspiration from the classical technique of chiaroscuro and the still life paintings of the Dutch Masters fused with the innately human fascination with fire—its primal energy and potential for destruction, and its magical associations and cleansing qualities—the visual identity and experiential event design re-imagined the dining experience to create an unforgettable night of unhinged elegance.