Some events are all about the noise. This one was about the table.
In June 2026 we designed a premium 16-page A5 programme for Allianz Stadium's Nations Championship 2026 hospitality dinner — an evening put on for media partners, key sponsors, top chefs and senior guests, all in one room.
The brief was short and very clear: a printed piece that lived up to the night. Premium. Chefs and their food front and centre. True to the Allianz Stadium brand. And sitting on every table before guests arrived.
Worth saying out loud, because people assume they're the same job. A matchday programme is a fixture record: teams, stats, history, ads, sold at the gate. A hospitality dinner programme is a keepsake for a room of guests who have already been looked after. Nobody is flicking through it to check the score. They're picking it up between courses, at a table with sponsors on either side.
That changes everything about pacing. A dinner programme has to be confident enough to hold a table's attention in short bursts, and generous enough that a guest takes it home rather than leaving it behind. Sixteen pages, A5, premium — that's the format we landed on with the stadium team, and it's a good one for a night like this: big enough to carry real photography and chef features, small enough to feel considered rather than corporate.
The heart of the piece was the food. Chef features and recipes from names like Tom Kerridge and Brett Graham, chef and food photography throughout, and a proper celebration of the best produce England has to offer.
Designing around chefs is a lovely constraint, because the material is already beautiful. The job is mostly restraint: give the photography room, set the type to stay out of its way, and treat each recipe as a spread worth turning to rather than a column to get through. We designed the whole 16-page A5 programme from scratch, taking it from first idea through to finished, print-ready artwork.
There's a temptation with event collateral to invent a look for the night. We went the other way. The programme was kept in step with the Allianz Stadium brand — same voice, same visual language — so a guest picking it up felt they were holding something from the stadium, not from an agency. A programme that fights the venue's brand reads as a separate project. A programme that belongs to the venue reads as part of the evening.
The date was set, so there was no room to let the deadline slip — and the print-ready handover is where event projects usually come unstuck. Artwork that arrives late, or arrives with the wrong bleed, or in a file the printer can't use, costs a day nobody has.
We had the finished artwork ready before the deadline, and handed it over to the printer exactly as they needed it.
Decide what the piece is for before you design a page. Keepsake, information pack and souvenir are three different programmes.
Book photography first. Print deadlines are unforgiving; photo shoots are the thing that moves.
Agree the brand guardrails early. Knowing what you can and can't stretch saves a round of changes.
Plan the handover as a deliverable. Print-ready means print-ready: correct size, bleed, colour and file setup, checked before it leaves the studio.
Treat the date as fixed and work backwards. Everything else can flex.
If you're putting on an event and want printed collateral people actually take home, have a look at the project or see more of our work. We're a design studio in West London, and we're always happy to talk through a brief before it becomes a deadline.
