Reimagining an iconic publishing brand

We took a look at the Travel+Leisure website both with the brand and independently in our own research and discovery, and talked through the things that were important to the brand. The site, we discovered, housed a lot of things today that didn’t necessarily need to be there tomorrow. It was this realization that led us to shifting the focus of this digital rebrand to T+L’s content strategy.

The brand had so much great content to offer, but the design and user interface did not lend towards easy discovery. Essentially, the quality of the website didn’t match the quality of the content. It gave us the opportunity to remove the clutter and focus on the product and its experience in a way that would best convey the core values of the brand and bring the purity of the product back into the design. That sounded like something that was right up our alley.

The new Travel+Leisure digital brand had to sync up with the rebrand on the print side of the business. For us, this meant an aggressive timeline with an unmovable launch date. Fortunately, the team at T+L shared our vision for great quality while understanding the implications of their deadline, enabling us to utilize an agile workflow effectively.

Because we were aligned with the same goal and because both teams were incredibly solution-oriented, we were able to work collaboratively and nimbly, righting ourselves as soon as we had even an inkling of a feeling that we were teetering off-course. We studied the brand together and made decisions around which pieces we wanted to bring over from the print side of the house and which pieces we wanted to be digital first.

We helped them to simplify their brand, reorganizing the way their content was laid out and giving their beautiful travel imagery a chance to shine. Smartly utilizing analytics they had on hand, we were able to help them re-architect all the great content they had and pushed them forward in creating a sleek, easy-to-use design that reflected the brand’s core values.

Our teams gelled, each sharing a vision for what the brand could evolve into and an enthusiasm for tackling tough problems with strategic solutions. We worked so well together that halfway through the rebrand, T+L asked us to work with their backend team to integrate the new user experience and designs we’d so carefully crafted together.

As we reviewed our research, it was clear, though unsurprising, that the T+L mobile audience was exploding. So, we quickly decided on a mobile-first strategy. We had the luxury of having a whole database full of beautiful imagery that Travel+Leisure could draw upon to populate the website, and we used that to our advantage. Additionally, the solution that we implemented needed to be inspirational but also utilitarian – two very important parts of the T+L brand identity.

We put together a content strategy that gave content a hierarchy so that the editorial staff could point users to the things that were most important. To avoid making the site feel cluttered while allowing the user to easily navigate their way around without taking away from the experience, we selectively implemented transitions where we thought was necessary.

Recirculation strategies were put into place to inspire readers to keep exploring, keeping them curious and engaged – a T+L brand of wanderlust where content strategy and beautiful design intersected. Together, we created a website that was elegant, simple, and easy to use. The end result? A beautifully designed, extremely usable, responsive website that created an experience tailored to the user’s device of choice.

We successfully launched the newly branded T+L in 2015, and it was met with resounding success. So much in fact, that the new T+L site became a Webby Award Winner. We were able to measure against metrics we had set goals against at the beginning of the project and analytics show double digit positive increases in all success metrics, from revenue to pages per visit per user. But, perhaps, most importantly, our content strategy coupled with our crisp design and purposeful cross-platform user experience integration pushed the brand forward, giving them the tools to succeed in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.