Bar Awards

The Bar Awards were created by Alissa McCulloch in 2024 to celebrate the community of incredible hospitality businesses and workers in Newcastle. Alissa has championed Newcastle for over a decade setting up and continuing to run HUNTERhunter since 2014. HUNTERhunter promotes the region highlighting where to eat, drink, shop, stay and generally hang out in the Hunter region. Headjam collaborated with HUNTERhunter all those years ago across their brand and design for the platform and it was great to come back together 10 years later to work on the Bar Awards with Alissa and the team.

To help launch the Bar Awards to the hospitality industry in Newcastle.

Newcastle hospitality industry and patrons of their venues to vote on the “people’s choice award” categories.

Celebrating bars and mixologists.

“I’d love to be involved in the bar awards.”

We created the identity and promotional elements of the campaign for the awards based on the humble coaster found in all bars around the world.

The lockup of a coaster was a great visual tool and foundation for us to be able to work to promote the awards across multiple mediums in a cost-effective way. Coasters were physically produced and distributed to all venues promoting the People's Choice Awards encouraging people to log on and submit their vote for their favourite venue in the region.

We worked to create illustration and animated assets for social platforms to break the normal overuse of food and drink photography found in these channels. Combined with a bright yellow accent colour the campaign was positioned to stop people from scrolling or clicking past the content and encouraging people to read the copy that was present, giving it a fighting chance of being shared in an over-saturated world of social media.

We worked on the design for the event itself with the event team to create signage, digital award screens, menus, and excitingly commissioned a local artist to hand-make the awards. These awards were made from a laser-cut see-through perspex mimicking a coaster and the bases were hand-crafted bevelled wood with a cut out to place the coaster in. These were customised for each award winner with the etching including their name and award category.

A sold-out event in it’s first year!

We distributed over 60,000 coasters around the city which resulted in 2,600 people’s choice award submissions. For the industry awards the event received over 500 entries across 14 categories and over 290 tickets sold for the award event night. Some incredible stats for the first year of the event.