DESTINY CRUISE MARKETING CAMPAIGN
With the Destiny Cruise marketing campaign, the goal was to create more of a frictionless, easy to read and digest design language to inspire customers to purchase the fictional cruise company's services. By doing that, like every other campaign, I studied the trends that most cruising sites contained. After a few design strategies, and logo making, the end result turned out great.
Tools Used: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
THE SHOWCASE
This is a showcase of what the landing page looks like across multiple device platforms. This campaign is also followed by items like informative brochures, postcards and pins that're all tailored towards the Destiny Cruise design language.
THE BRAND GUIDELINES
The Destiny Cruise Brand Guidelines were a little similar to Tundra's. But instead, the goal was to incorporate more of a dream-like aesthetic. I found that using light and pastel colors helps give the brand a bit more of a fantasy vibe. Along with that, using fonts like Franklin Gothic Medium for thin stroked typefaces on body paragraphs, as well as the Acumin Variable Concept for descriptions worked well for the overall design language of the site.
THE PROBLEM
The biggest problem when creating the Destiny Cruise marketing campaign was being able to stand out amongst other cruising competitors. Not only that, but being able to show a variety of features that no other cruising company has in an effective way.
THE RESEARCH
When conducting my research, I once again interviewed a handful of peers, classmates, and workmates about what they'd like to see from a cruise line. Not only that, but what attracts them to purchase a ticket from one cruise line versus another. Thankfully, I have a few colleagues who would essentially be the connoisseurs of going cruise trips.
About 60% of the individuals that I've asked the question to responded by saying that they would like to see popular cruises along with affordable pricing. I asked, why are popular cruises one of the more important things to see? The individual answered back and explained that knowing about popular cruises, how they're rated, and how well they're priced would gauge a judgement in a customer's mind (especially a new one) about what cruise they would want to embark on. The well-received popular cruise? Or cruises that are the least explored?
Another well-seasoned cruise connoisseur mentioned how it's beneficial for a cruise line to have attributes and services while cruising that makes them stand out from the crowd. Like fun spas, great hotels, good food, and many other amenities.
CONSTRUCTING THE WIREFRAME
After gathering that research, I went to on to sketching and building the wireframe of the landing page. The user would first be greeted with the option to choose a date for the cruise they plan on embarking on. I made sure to make this section simpler to the eye without any cluttered areas to distract the user from other obnoxious elements.
If the user isn't interested in booking a cruise just yet, the user has the option to scroll down to view the various different kinds of cruise lines the company has to offer starting from popular cruises, all the way to potential sweepstakes that the user can enter.
Towards the bottom of the landing page shows the "Why Choose Us?" section, which shows various different amenities that makes Destiny Cruise stand out amongst the crowd of other cruise companies.
WRAPPING THINGS UP
Finally, I applied the visuals to the wireframe and wrapped everything in a nice and neat bow. This was where I absolutely needed to follow the brand guidelines, or else the design for the landing page would end up falling short. I made sure to showcase the popular cruises by using attractive eye catching island photography with geographically correct locations. I also made sure to incorporate cruise ratings and of course, the overall price for the user to see.
Towards the middle of the landing page, I also made sure to use visuals that support some of the "call to action" advertisements. Such as using a snapshot of a Sweden for a European Cruise Sweepstakes ad, or delicious food to advertise what you can get when you book a cruise and receive discount meals.
At the bottom of the landing page, I spent time creating vector images that accurately represents each reason why Destiny Cruise is the company to go with, and why they stand out amongst the rest.
THE POSTCARD
The postcard for Destiny Cruise had to convey a sense of happiness and adventure. A good way to do that was to follow brand guides and use the company's light colors and pair them with smooth flowing lines to give a sense of flow within in the postcard.
THE BROCHURE
As mentioned before, Showcasing what Destiny Cruise's strong suits was one of the biggest priorities when it comes to making an informative brochure. The next biggest priority to was create eye-catching visuals that could potentially inspire a reader to look more into the great services that the company has to offer.
RETROSPECTIVE
CHALLENGES
The biggest challenge I faced when working on this marketing campaign was creating a logo that accurately represents what the company is trying to advertise to its customers. But the bigger challenge was trying to convey more of an elegant aesthetic that felt seamless across all platforms. Which made me come up with the idea to use less hard edges with my designs and replace them with smoother, cleaner lines.
WHAT CAN BE IMPROVED?
The direction I took when designing the brochure looked great on paper, but wasn't exactly easy to execute digitally. The amount of images I had to use wasn't working too well with Illustrator when paired with the various amounts of layers that I had in place. Thankfully, I was able to figure out a useful way to scale down the file sizes to make sure that the overall Illustrator file was able to work well with InDesign and Photoshop, which can be used to later projects as well.
WHAT'S NEXT?
Now that I've figured out how to better manage my file sizes when getting higher into layers, I can take what I know now and apply it to the next marketing campaign that I work on next. Using these techniques would not only make things easier to manage, but would also speed up my workflow.