Copenhagen- The City of Fairtale Life
Project 5- Tourism Campaign
Campaign Goal
The goal of this project is to create a responsive website design and campaign for a selected city or area. In this project, I decided to create a website for the city Copenhagen, concentrating on the fairytale lifestyle of this magical city. The time given to complete this project is 3 weeks, we need to apply our knowledge that we learned in past 3 months with applications and skills.
1. Research
1.1 Why Copenhagen? Why fairytale life style?
The Danes are known to be the happiest people, their quality of living continuously rated as the best in the world. Beside the lifestyle side, Copenhagen has always been a personal dream destination since I was a little kid. Like many other girls, I grew up reading the Andersen’s fairy tale books and hoping one day I would live in my own fairy tale life. As I grew older, achieving this goal became harder and seems a little too far off, however visiting the born place of the fairy tale books is more like a dream comes true. The royal castles, the food, the cultural tours, the historical buildings, the modern Nordic design styles, visiting Copenhagen is a perfect way to experience cultural differences and experience different lifestyle.
1.2 Competitive Research
Since Denmark is really close to other Nordic countries, then why not other countries or cities? During my research, many people consider other Nordic countries to be too cold and desolated, attraction sites are too far from each other. Considering that geographically, Denmark connects to Germany and the entire country is composed of islands, Copenhagen is located in a very convenient place where you can easily arrive there from anywhere with ferries, trains and flights. When visitors consider visiting Scandinavia, Denmark is usually the first landing place.
1.3 User persona
The user persona I created for this campaign is based on the current tourism trend through my research. Also since I did not create a survey for this project or interviewed potential users, this persona is mostly subjective to my personal experience.
Vikki K — 22 year old female
- Lived all her life in West Coast, Canada
- Recently graduated from Uni, decide to take a year off and travel to the other side of the world to experience a different life
- Grew up reading the fairy tales
- Time for her to explore the fairy tale life of her own
With a background like Vikki, she’s very young and adventurous, ready to start her own journey and discover her own path along the way.
2. Planning — Visual Language
2.1 Moodboard
I researched pictures of Copenhagen and trying to decide how I want to portray this amazing city. I came up with 2 directions: the old fairy tale style and new fairy tale style. The old fairy tale style will give out that vintage old school and neutral feeling to users, with the usage of neutral and tuned down colour palette, the old fairy tale vibe shall take mature users right back to their childhood memories. However, this style might not resonate well with my user persona whom are a lot younger, this neutral and tuned down vibe might not catch their attention very well.
This is when I decided to go with the new fairy tale style. Soft pink and blue will be pairing with bright orange, red and blue to enhance the contrast of colours. All five colours I chose actually came from the colours of the landmark building at Nyhavn, and red is the also the colour of Denmark national flag. During my research, I found a quot from Hans Christian Andersen saying “the most wonderful fairy tale is life itself”. This is exactly the essence I hope to capture with my design, the excitement from the adventures and unknown in life and the spirit of overcome hurdles head on bravely.
2.2 Design Inception
Every design has that deeper meaning to it to give it a soul. The “why” I have in mind is “living your version of fairy tale life”. I think everyone has their own version of successful life or I shall call it the fairy tale life, with this “why” in mind it should allow me to design something that could draw recognition from common crowd. I hope to give my users that soft and smooth feeling with the use of soft colours and round shapes. This clean representation shall give out that dreamy and modern feeling.
2.3 Interface Research
During my research of the current official tourism campaign websites, I can see a lot of websites have that boxes on top and big photos beneath style as home page. When it comes to the logo, it’s mostly simple logo next to name of that country or city. At home page, it’s the big slogan in the middle and photo at the back. I can see why this kind of style is adopted and I want my home page will be a little different.
3. Design
3.1 Style Tile
Since I decided on the colour scheme, choosing fonts might be a little bit difficult as I want that fairy tale yet clean and modern feeling.
I stayed with simple pairing of sans serif font Sofia Pro and serif font Caslon Pro. The reason why I chose Caslon Pro is because a lot of the old books used this font so it’s easier to deliver that vintage feel right away. For the city name I used script font Back to Black, with some adjustments of the size of certain letters and their looks, made the word looking more legible. In order to keep that comfortable and soft vibe, all the buttons have round edges and all the icons are circles.
3.2 Logo Design
It took me quite a while to design the logo. The official website used the little mermaid silhouette as the logo for the city. Since The Little Mermaid is such an icon of the city, and she’s also one of the most famous characters out of the fairy tale books, I decided to incorporate the mermaid’s tail in the logo. My original plan was to have the iconic royal Kronborg Castle AKA the Shakespeare’s Hamlet Castle at the back, the mermaid’s tail at the front.
Since the space is limited for the logo, I decided to go with just have the tail and bubbles, which represents that in the book the little mermaid turned into bubbles at the end, and this logo is inside a circle which is also a bubble.
At the same time, I want the user to know the Danish spelling for this city, so I put the name København underneath the circle of logo.
3.3 Animation
With my original design concept, I want the landing page consists of a video clip of Copenhagen, the slogan and the enter button. When you clicked the enter button, there’ll be a short animation of the little mermaid’s tail flap the water and break the current, the ripples will wave out and bring out the official homepage. When you browse the site and click for different pages, I wanted the change of pages to be brought out by waves/ripples and bubbles floating from the bottom for loading time. When it comes to city attractions, I wanted the change of attractions as flipping of pages o f a book to create that magical feel. However, with the scope of this project, time is of essence here so I scrapped the original plan and sticked to something that’s more practical for this project. This is something that could be considered as future consideration.
3.4 Campaign Promos
For this campaign, since people use instagram more often these days, I created four insta pages to promote the 3 most popular attractions and an elegant restaurant provides traditional and modern Danish food.
3.5 Merchandise/Swags
As of merchandise design, I created shirts, mugs and snow globes.
4. Prototype
Please see below Invision links to desktop pages and mobile pages.
Future Considerations:
- The landing page will started with a video clip, then with a click of “enter” button, it’ll take you to the homepage.
- The animation part mentioned above shall be done.
- Other pages will be implemented and the users can plan their trips on this website straight away, with recommendations of flights, accommodations, ferries, inner city travel plans, etc.
