Hawaii Sail

Client

Hawaii Sail

Project Scope

Logo Design
Branding & Identity Design
Web Design
User Experience Design

The Challenge

Can modern web design have a nostalgic retro feel to it? How can we create a visual identity that stands out in a sea of tourism, staying true to our roots and culture? Are we adding value to our customers stays here in out home?

The Solution

A two weight font family that has a home in the 21st century. The aesthetics of the typeface is a rounded grotesque sans serif take on a script that was created in 863 AD. Its modern feel gives it a soft and friendly technical character.

Strategy

The creative brief was shared during the first meeting with the client. They laid out a plan of what and how they wanted it aesthetically to look and feel. They were open to suggestions in how the brand would look. I developed my ideas from going back and looking at retro design and lifestyle. Old tv commercials and album covers. I took that inspiration and was able to create a modern take on a retro style.

This all tied into creating something catered towards out target market of visitors from the US West/East. In 2018 alone we saw 9+ million visitors, with 1.6 million being from the US West/East. In 2018 Hawaiian tourism was a $17.8b industry with $11.2b coming from the US west and east visitors.

That's a lot of cheese! I researched what the competition is doing locally, nationally, and internationally to gain a better understanding of nautical tourism.

LOGO

I went through a few iterations before the client was happy with the outcome of the logo. Like the other parts of the site, this had to have a retro feel to it, but still be clean and polished enough for 2019. After they were happy with the initial concept, I went through and did a color study for the logo, settling on the classic blue and red.

First round designs

I used waves taken off a old sailing symbol to give this a sense of motion

Second round designs

I wanted to see how a slab serif looked with a minimalistic approach to a sailboat shape

The client was most happy with this option. I made some further refinements on the sail to give it a little more character

Third round color choices

DESIGN

The identity is a fresh take on a retro idea. I used lots of duotone photos, with different blues to keep it nautical. The logo is inspired by large script font using power colors. The text is red, and the sail is two shades of blue. The design brief called for a retro feeling website. For the hero sections, I implemented duo color photos and large bold text. Since this is a site that sells tours, I used a lot of large beautiful colorful images to do some of the heavy liftings.

COLOR

USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN

On the home page, I used a hero image of a family having fun on a catamaran with a description of what Hawaii Sail does. This instantly helps the user to identify what the site is about and is the first step in building trust in what Hawaii Sail does. The nex segment is an island selector that helps funnel the user to an activity based on the island they will be staying on or visiting. I use 100VH sections in the body of the homepage to make the content easily digestible. I use beautiful imagery with a heading and one paragraph of text to keep things uniform and easily identifiable. I also have a segment that is a visual search based on categories of tours.

I designed it to be as straight forward as possible for the user to find and select a tour that they like. The goal is to have ease of use for people who are not tech savvy, but beautiful enough to keep a visitor on the page and interested in the site and tours. I also have a section where it focuses on dynamic user-generated data, to keep things fresh for repeat visitors.

I usually start the information architecture using post it notes

I then jumped into the digital high fidelity wireframe

The mobile layout