ABOUT

Design system for marketing and information communication that customers receive on their cruise journey, categorised into 4 stages – pre-booking, booking, pre-arrival and post-cruise. Fred. Olsen wanted to organise the whole experience in a meaningful way, while also pushing the brand creatively.

Visual design system

Fred. Olsen’s brand colour palette included colours mapped to world regions that their cruises visited. They had existing illustrations for each region, which had colour palette variations according to how light changes throughout day on a cruise.

My visual design approach was built around superimposing these stages of the day onto the cusomer journey itself.

Colour

I grouped the brand colour palette into tones that matched the tones of the daylight stages, and used those in the designs for each stage of the customer journey. Pre-booking communications such as brochure requests and sales followups used the softer, cooler tones of the first light dawn, while booking acknowledgements and invoices used the bright greens and blues of high noon. The pre-arrival cruise information colour palette used rich oranges and purples of the golden hour, and post-cruise feedback and promos used the midnight tones encompassing brand blues.

Design

The communications had to be regionally non-specific, so the illustrations had to be cropped quite tightly to remove any landmarks or distinguishing features. This created the problem of the ships being very large when used, which went against the elegant feel of the brand.

To get around this, and to push the branding creatively, I split the illustrations into foreground and background, and used the foreground to break out of the brand flag that was used as an illustration frame on the cover. This allowed the ship, foreground and background to be scaled separately in order to achieve the most pleasing crop and suit the layout.

Initially this was created for emails, but the concept was expanded to include offline and print communications.