Booking.com
Design Language
A comprehensive framework of visual and conceptual elements including color, typography, imagery, and more—Designed to ensure a cohesive and recognizable Booking.com brand experience.
Role:
Principal Designer
Responsibilities:
Creative and art direction, design, stakeholder management, team recruitment, 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 a historically 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 enabled a scalable and modular system that continues to power the holistic Booking.com experience 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 selected Dalton-Mag to develop our custom font, helping to solve our inconsistent use of brand and product fonts across platforms.
Credits:
Steven Baguley, Catalin Brindinel, Gustavo Contreras, Oleksii Drozdenko, Jade Goldsmith Holly Lincoln, Arda Karacizmeli, Fiorella Rizza, Elena Snezhinskaya, Diana Marcela Agudelo Hernandez, Che Douglas, Jordan Kay, Dalton Mag, and countless contributors from the Booking.com community.
The two and a half years behind this work weren’t just about design decisions. They also involved countless conversations, stakeholder education, and bringing many voices into alignment. That investment in process is what gives these guidelines their strength and staying power.