The 'Gu Guide
As part of the Design 101 course at DesignLab I took on the challenge to design a landing page for a travel destination. I decided to create a guide for Canggu, Bali, as it is a favourite place of my own. I developed a brand style guide and designed a responsive landing page for three different devices.
The process
The focus in the Design 101 course is on visual design, but I was approaching the project with a design thinking mindset.
I started by specifying a target group and creating a persona, Elly, since it is crucial to know who I am designing for. As I was discovering my persona’s needs and motivations I defined the problem statement “How can I help Elly find new places in Canggu that enables her to feel trendy and hip”? I then came up with a few “How might we” questions to even narrow down the problem I was trying to solve.
How might we help Elly choose which places to go?
How might we present the places in an inspiring way?
How might we make Elly feel confident that this is a place for her?
How might we show Elly which places are nearby her?
How might we show Elly what other people think of a place?
With these questions in mind I did a time boxed brainstorming session to come up with as many ideas on features and content as possible using a mind map. I then ranked and selected the most promising ideas.
I created sketches of the landing page. First on paper, then I selected the best version and turned it into low fidelity wireframes for three break points using Balsamiq.
Next on I developed a style guide consisting of logo, colours, typography, imagery and digital assets. I explored two different expressions; one a bit more playful, and the other one a bit more sophisticated and mature. I made the decision to move forward with a mix of the two. This was based on design best practises like readability but also on current trends.
You can view the final style guide here.
I applied the final style guide on my wireframes and worked on the nitty gritty, turning it into final design. Please feel free to view the Figma prototypes here.
Learnings & reflections
Some of the main things I learnt was how to work with a grid and designing with different breaking points, colour theory, typography, etc. I enjoyed every part of the challenge.
As the focus on this project was more on visual design, no testing was made. If this was a real world project I would have done more user research and also some testing throughout the project to gain feedback on the features and also the style guide.