2016

_Consumer web

_Brand Strategy

_STYLE GUIDE

_DESIGN SYSTEM

 

WeTravel Brand + Style

Designing holistically means knowing your goals, and utilizing them to keep everyone on the same page— whether they're a designer or an engineer.

I led the WeTravel Co-Founders and UI Team through a process to articulate cohesive brand principles for WeTravel as a company. This process was a foundation for coordinating a style guide of functional UI specifications based on WeTravel's previously established visual design and layout guidelines. We called it the "Voyager Style Guide."

 

Why a Style Guide?

Use them to guide brand consistency and the perception of business objectives, both within a company and within the user experience.

 

MY ROLE: LEAD DESIGNER

I led the core WeTravel team and full Tradecraft design team through a 2-hour workshop to pinpoint WeTravel's values, worked closely with the UI team to coordinate the final published style guide, and made sure they were aligned with the final design of WeTravel's Trip Details + Booking Flow.

WHAT WE DID

We worked to understand company priorities via brand workshopping, also taking an interface inventory of previously established elements. The final foundational resource intends to assist designers and developers, providing swift component navigation and communication for informed decisions further down the pipeline.

 
 

A Collaborative Process

The WeTravel Style Guide, which we named Voyager, aims to be a reference through present and future design and communications decisions. It is for everyone: from designers, to developers, to sales, and of course, for the founders themselves.

Together with the core WeTravel team, we went through a fun and interactive dump-and-sort exercise.

"Write sticky notes for what WeTravel would be if it were a magazine."

"Who would the readers be? What lifestyles would it promote?"

"What is WeTravel to you?"


Finding Patterns

We collected and grouped the sticky notes from each of these rounds into themes.

After narrowing down 6 distinctive themes that expressed what WeTravel is now and what they hope to become, we asked the co-founders to rank the themes in order of most important to least important. Our final resulting values were:

Community, Trust, Inspiration,

Simple, Informative, and Fresh.

Following the workshop, the UI team banded together to create a design principles guide which expanded on each of these values, listed associated characteristics, and collected a standardized set of design elements into a format that is accessible, online and easy to navigate.

See some of the final pages sampled below.