Booking.com
A comprehensive framework of visual and conceptual elements, including colors, typography, imagery and more, that guides the creation of a consistent and recognizable Booking.com.
Design Language
Role:
Principal Designer
Responsibilities:
Design, art direction, creative direction, team recruitment, stakeholder management, naysayer conversion and holistic cheerleading
More than two decades of product experimentation and decentralized decision-making lead to a disjointed Booking.com brand and user experience. To solve this problem we set out to define comprehensive guidelines that would inform product and marketing for dozens of independent, global teams. The objective for the design language was to create stronger, customer-facing consistency as well as streamlined internal processes for designers, writers and developers.
Outcomes:
• Improved consistency across product and marketing applications
• More efficient decision-making by the decentralized organization
• Improved customer trust and brand recall
The creation and adoption of the Booking.com design language was an ambitious cultural shift as we moved the company from from data-driven decision-making to one that was data-informed, guided by thoughtfully-crafted principles, styles and templates. The design language made possible a scaleable and modular design system that Booking.com still uses today.
Expansion:
• Customer-facing illustration style
• Custom font
With the foundational elements of the design language defined, we moved on to two more key ingredients, illustration style and a custom font. The illustration style was defined by our in-house team, inclusive of style definition and a library of ready-to-use illustrations for product and marketing purposes. We brought in Dalton-Mag to create the custom font, which would resolve our inconsistent use of brand and product fonts across platforms.
Looking for an effective outro. The work above represents more than two and a half years worth of work. I think it’d be good to acknowledge some of the folks who worked on it too. Special thanks Gustavo, Holly, Arda, Oleksii, Diana Marcela Agudelo Hernandez, Firstname Lastname, Dalton Mag, Jordan and countless contributors from the Booking.com community.
