Courtyard is a brand of mid-prices range of hotels owned by Marriott International Group. Courtyard was created in 1983 to target business travelers and pleasure travelers. The brand now owns 1,199 hotels worldwide with 178,438 rooms, which makes Courtyard the largest brand within the Marriott International portfolio.
The first Courtyard by Marriott hotel opened in Atlanta, Georgia in 1983. And today it is number eight on the list of major hotel brands, with more than a thousand hotels across the globe.
According to Marriott, “Courtyard hotels, specifically designed for the upscale segment, focus primarily on short business trips.” It is a chain of comfortable hotels, created for business travelers, with not much emphasis on design and art, but on quality and comfort.
The rooms feature simple and minimalistic interiors, executed in light and neutral colors, which allow people staying there to relax and forget about work for some time.
What is Courtyard?
Courtyard is a chain of upscale hotels, owned by the Marriott Group. The chain has more than a thousand locations worldwide, offering its clients to stay in one of its 150 thousand rooms. The first hotel of the chain was opened in 1983 in Atlanta, Georgia.
The original Courtyard Hotels logo was designed in 1982 and stayed with the hotel chain for more than twenty years, which makes it the most long-lasting badge of all ever created for the brand. It was a solid green horizontally stretched crest with rounded angles and a thick golden frame. The color of the frame was balanced by the gold emblem, depicting five trees set on a horizontal line, and placed on the upper part of the crest. The main part boasted a bold white logotype with the “Courtyard” in the uppercase, executed in a custom sleek serif font, and underlined by the white “Marriott” logo in its corporate style with the emblem on the left.
The redesign of 2003 refined the contours of the elements and changed the shape of the crest to a wide arched banner. The green banner was now overlapping the red one, with the bottom border arched down from the center. The white Marriott logo was moved to that right part of the new badge, being enlarged and having the emblem removed. As for the main part of the badge, it still had the golden trees emblem above the whole inscription, but the trees now featured a thin white outline and the letters of the wordmark got a bit thicker. The green color of the background gained a brighter shade, which created a good contrast with the lettering, looking powerful and memorable.
In 2010 the Courtyard logo was redesigned again, and this time it was about simplifying the composition. The light green logotype was now set on a white background with no framing, accompanied by the iconic trees emblem, which was set in the same shade of green above the inscription. The logo was underlined by the Marriott logotype in the corporate typeface, written in bold line in orange color with no emblem added. This badge stayed in use by the hotel chain for a bit less than four years and was definitely the least popular and recognizable among all the versions created.
The redesign of 2014 introduced the most minimalist yet very stylish Courtyard badge, executed in a medium-gray color palette. The new logo featured only two lines of the lettering — the “Courtyard” in the uppercase of a refined serif typeface with elegant contours and thick smooth lines, and the iconic Marriott insignia, set under the main wordmark in a smaller size, with its bold lines not followed by any graphical elements.
Courtyard hotel brand is focused primarily on transient business travel and the brand’s logo reflects its philosophy.
The Courtyard logo is simple in its form but adds more life by using bright orange as the main color. Orange color is a symbol of youth, passion and success and it represents the brand, targeting the next generation of business travelers.
The sophisticated uppercase logotype of Courtyard is set in a classy modern sans-serif typeface with one interesting detail — a diagonally set bar of the “A”, which turns the traditional font into somewhat unique and elegant. The closest fonts to the one, used in this insignia are, probably, Hurme Geometric Sans 1 SemiBold and Noyh Geometric Medium.
As for the color palette of the Courtyard’s visual identity, it is composed of smooth gold and black, set against a white background. This combination looks timeless and elegant, representing quality, excellence, and style.