OUGD503 - Airbnb development

Vector traces of sketches

ID card background

Inside cover experiment

Prototype to take to Precision

Intended cover stock

One of the D&AD briefs that stood out to us was the airbnb brief. The task was to explore how Airbnb can 'creatively empower their existing community to grow the idea of belonging.' The outcome should work across both digital and physical platforms.

We spent some time as a group brainstorming some ideas. We decided that we wanted to create outcomes that were physical and tangible. This would make customers more inclined to share this with their friends than if the outcome was solely digital. After looking into designing postcards and letters we settled on creating a faux passport. This fits perfectly with the idea of travel and the outcome will seem important as its based on such an official document.

The passport would work more as a travel journal than an actual passport, it will be a way to document your journeys and remember the people that you have stayed with along the way. 

We wanted to keep some elements of an actual passport within the design so we decided to make an equivalent of the stamps you get when travelling outside the EU. After looking on the Airbnb website we came across a feature that allows you to create your own Airbnb symbol. Each traveller would have their own symbol which is completely individual. This would then be printed onto stickers which the customers would receive alongside the passport when they sign up. These stickers will work in the same way that the stamps work on real passports. Airbnb hosts and fellow Airbnb travellers would also have their own sticker which they could put in your passport. We printed the stickers onto transparent sticker paper so that patterns and illustrations could be seen behind them. The stickers would be placed on one of the blank pages alongside another blank page for comments, drawings or diagrams. The hosts  and travellers could use this page for whatever they would like, they could make comments on how you were as a guest, write some travel tips for the place you are staying or just do a little doodle. This would strengthen the connections travellers have with their hosts and the Airbnb community as a whole.

We looked at Airbnb's existing brand guidelines to define the conventions that we would have to design within. Airbnb's brand involves a strong use of colour, a heavy focus on their 'belo',  illustration and image using flat colour and Circular Std as the type.

We decided that the passport should include an ID card in the same way that official passports do, this should be reminiscent of these official documents. We looked at our own passports for research as well as looking at passports from various other countries. The use of intricate pattern as the background is present in almost all of the ID cards that we looked at. This is most likely for anti-fraud purposes. Although this isn't an issue that we foresee Airbnb coming across we decided to use intricate pattern as it was both visually pleasing and made the ID card look official. We experimented with different sizes of the 'belo' to make up the pattern and also different tints of Rausch. We settled on using a gradient and a repeat of the 'belo' at a very small size. We added a border to the ID card as we wanted to use a border for the rest of the pages in the passport and needed to maintain continuity. We also wanted to use a border as the pattern was less effective at full bleed. The logo was needed on the ID card and the border helped to accommodate this. 

We selected five colours from the brand guidelines including Rausch, Airbnb's 'hero' colour. Each spread would use one of these colours at different opacities. Similarly to the recent Norweigan passport design we wanted to use illustration as the background for the spreads. We wanted to emphasise the fact that with Airbnb you can 'belong anywhere' so we chose to depict a number of locations with completely different scenery. The locations were all found on the Airbnb website and the majority of them are views from Airbnb accomodation. We based the illustrations on photographs but changed them slightly to ensure that the composition was balanced. We started by drawing these out by hand, we then traced these drawings using Illustrator and selected different tints of the colours for each section of the image. At first we considered using every colour on every page but concluded that this would look garish and be far too distracting to draw and write on top of. Each image would be limited to one colour. When we put the illustrations into inDesign. We agreed that they were too bold to work as a background so we tried out different opacities, eventually settling on fifty percent.

The size of the passport was originally going to be a6 but to maintain authenticity we measured our own passports and used this format. The size was 88mmx125mm. We used a 6 column grid with 10mm margins. The grid was only utilised on a small number of the pages but it was useful to have it there. 

We applied page numbers by adding a semicircle into the border on either side of the page. The left hand page displayed the 'belo' in the same colour as the illustration and the right hand page displayed the page number. We laboured over the size and positioning of this as well as the font weight and tracking but after some time resolved all of this. 

We visited Precision print as we wanted to ensure that the quality of the passport was as high as it could be and outsourcing our printing was one way to do this. We discussed various stock choices and printing techniques that we wanted to use. We suggested foil blocking, embossing, spot varnishing and gloss laminating, all of these would make the passport look really official. James at Precision explained the cost of all of these processes and due to funding limitations we decided to just use embossing and gloss laminate. The embossing was applied to the cover and the laminate to the ID card page and the back page displaying a QR code. Both of these processes improved the finish of the passport and made it look more official and desirable. We chose a fairly thin pure white stock for the pages of the passport. Thin so that we could fit lots of pages into the publication without it being too bulky, and pure white as colour is a huge part of the design and we wanted to make sure that the paper stock wouldn't skew the way the colour looked. For the cover of the passport we looked at numerous textured paper stocks but settled on ColorPlan Morroco. The texture was similar to the texture of our own passports and again made the passport look more official. Unfortunately when the passports came back from print the cover stock wasn't the one which we selected. It was a similar weight but without the texture. We were all still really happy with the way they turned out but we all agreed they would have looked much better with the textured stock. The embossing wasn't as raised as we expected, again this is something we would change. We chose to use a simple staple bind due to cost limitations, I personally think saddle stitch would have looked much better and would use this binding technique if we were to do the project again.

Although there were some minor changes we would make, overall we were all really pleased with the outcome of the project and look forward to hearing feedback from D&AD.