Building a plane mid-flight: How we created the new Skyscanner brand world.
Creating a new brand world for a company with over 110 million monthly users is one thing. Doing so in the middle of a complex rebrand is something else entirely, especially for an in-house team.
If you’ll pardon the pun, we had to build the plane whilst flying it. Skyscanner’s marketing and design work had to continue as normal, while we developed the new brand world and transitioned it across all touchpoints.
As a team, we’ve certainly faced easier tasks…
The History
In 2019 (before my time at the company), Skyscanner collaborated with a well-known agency on a rebrand. This overhaul included everything from the logo and colours right down to the fonts. As you might expect, the redesign incorporated many new parts. And when I say many, I mean a plethora. Therein lay the problem.
It was complex. Too complex. Too many elements, too many colours, too many choices. In my experience, complexity leads to inconsistency, and that became our big problem: we were an inconsistent brand.
The image below shows where we were around 2021.
It became obvious that we needed a consistent look and feel. Most people knew the name “Skyscanner”, but not many had an idea of what Skyscanner actually looked like, because our style was a blend of all our competitors.
So, we knew what we had to do. Dieter Rams explains it best:
Good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better — because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.
Everything we built needed to pass two checks:
Consistency — Does everything feel like it’s coming from one “world”?
Usability — Can people understand this? Is it simple enough to use, but with enough flexibility to push creatively when needed?
To achieve the goals of consistency and usability, we followed a path of Reduction > Clarification > Amplification.
We reduced the number of components. We clarified what we would keep. We amplified those components so they all worked together in a design system.
How we broke things down
01: Colour
The first step in building brand consistency was to consider the brand’s colour. Seems obvious, right? If you work at Skyscanner, you know our heritage colour is blue. But when we looked at the colour palette we had at the time, it really wasn’t clear. We had at least 30+ colours.
We needed to double down on blue. Consistency comes from simplicity, but it also comes from repetition. Kind of like muscle memory. If we wanted to be a blue brand, we really had to make sure we emphasised it. If I asked you what the brand colour of Coca-Cola is, I bet 99.9% of you would say red. There’s a reason you don’t see blue Coca-Cola cans (although, I kind of like that idea…)
So, we cut our colour palette down from 30+ colours to 10, and split it into two groups. Our core colour palette consisted of just three colours and our secondary colour palette was seven “pop” colours, intended to add a splash of vibrancy to the brand when required.
For a deeper dive on our new colour palette, please check out this great post by our product design team.
So far so good, we had our colour. No ifs, no buts, Skyscanner was now blue. That was the easy part. We now needed to establish a distinct, coherent design language that laddered back to our mantra… Simplicity breeds consistency.
We did this by creating brand foundations. Everything needs a solid foundation or it falls. Our design foundations were divided into two sections. The first focused on core elements such as colour, typography, and grid.
The second section incorporated more flexible elements like photography and motion, enabling us to highlight our creative brand identity while maintaining a consistent style.
02: Flightpath
Along with colour, one of the most important components of our brand foundations is the grid, or the “flightpath” as we call it.
Flightpath plays a crucial role; everything else sits on top of it. It is our core structure and the framework for all creative designs, no matter the format, channel, or touchpoint. You can see why the flightpath is a key part of our mission to achieve simplicity and consistency.
Whatever design elements we use, we always ensure they are anchored to points on the flightpath. Whether it be text, logo, image, or UI components, anchoring them brings consistency and clarity to our compositions. Another of our internal mantras is:
Don’t be governed by the grid, govern the grid!
03: Typography
Type is more than just a component of our brand and design system. It’s at the heart of communication. Typefaces have enormous importance in both digital and real-world advertising, and they help deliver compelling and emotive messages that connect with users.
One of the things that we spared from our rebranding efforts was our main font — Skyscanner Relative (designed by Colophon).
This font is part of a fairly unique type family. With proportional graded weights, Relative uses letterforms that reflect the geometry of our well-known sunrise symbol, and its even stroke widths and slightly rounded corners capture Skyscanner’s character.
I’m a huge advocate of Swiss design principles: minimalist graphics, the use of a modular grid system, asymmetrical layout, and sans-serif fonts. We spent a lot of time designing our brand world around these principles. Skyscanner Relative slots in perfectly with this.
But to stay on course with our commitment to consistency, we needed to put some guardrails around type styles. We didn’t want to hamper people’s creativity, but it was important that we kept our eyes on the prize… consistency. Remember, the brand world is designed to be simple, yet flexible enough to expand creatively once the brand gains wide recognition. Get the basics right and grow from there.
Today, we have two main type styles. The first is Type style 01 (also known as “Display”) — big, bold, confident, uppercase, and centred. This is designed for short punchy headlines (less than five words). It helps us create a bold sense of impact that really catches the eye.
For this type style, we created various sizes to meet the needs across all brand applications (but always as black weight, to keep it succinct).
We also put a lot of thought into localisation and global consistency. We’re a global brand, and we need brand recognition in every market. So, we built in slight nuances in line height for different markets and considered replacement fonts where needed.
Our second main style is Type style 02 — easier to read, more conversational, left aligned, and lowercase. This is designed for headlines over five words, or for instances where we want to talk in a slightly softer way.
One of the advantages of following Swiss design principles is the timeless simplicity. It was vital that we create a clean, simple, effective, yet aesthetically pleasing brand world that wouldn’t go out of fashion. We didn’t want to follow trends (one of the worst things you can do, as you’ll be dated quickly). By keeping our type styles simple and minimal, we ensured consistency while still feeling modern and, arguably, timeless.
To add some personality and balance to our brand world, we introduced a secondary font — Larken (designed by Ellen Luff and Tom Watkins)
Larken was chosen for its conversational tone, ability to add warmth and personality to our brand identity, and its pleasing contrast to our primary typeface. We utilise Larken in two different weights — Regular and Light — which provide us with good contrast, depending on where we need to use it. To work alongside Larken, we also introduced the “bubble”.
04: The Bubble
The bubble is a graphical divide that acts as a conduit between Skyscanner and the user. Think of it like that friend who always finds the best deals, provides amazing life hacks, and fires cheeky one-liners.
The bubble is specifically used to catch the viewers’ attention, so it should always draw the eye in. This can be achieved by placement, use of colour, motion, or a combination of all three. By placing it close to the action, it also acts as a wayfinder.
By simplifying the brand foundations down to our core components, we set ourselves up to start flexing and pushing, after achieving brand recognition. The bubble is a perfect example of creativity based on consistent design style.
All of our foundational elements are built to “frame” key moments. These moments can be the user journey, the destination, or even a feeling or emotion. The flightpath, or the grid we base designs on, enables us to frame things like photography or video. It’s also a nod to the experience of looking through a window (whether that be the window of a plane, a hotel window, or a car window). It’s rooted in travel. This is crucial for Skyscanner, as we always think “For the traveller, by the traveller”.
This concept of framing leads us on to photography.
05: Photography
The most important thing about our photography is that we share real moments, with an authentic approach. It’s vital our images capture the essence of travel, whether it’s the awe-inspiring beauty of a destination, the quick moments that make a trip truly unique, or the seemingly small but meaningful details that bring it all together. We don’t want to add to the travel tropes and clichés. We strive to use real experiences with real people.
For our photography guidelines, we introduced the three R’s rule…
Make it Relatable. Make it Real. Keep it Recognisably fresh.
We also categorised images into three groups: Destinations, Moments and Details. These categories capture the beauty of a place, the emotions of travel, and the unique elements of local culture, respectively. Each is a crucial aspect of inspiring and transporting viewers to new destinations.
Destinations.
No restricted views. When showing destinations, we like a wide-angle shot. And if possible, we always try to show travellers within the image to give a sense of scale.
Moments.
There’s more to travel photography than amazing views. We use mid-range shots to show the world as it really is, as though we’re always by the traveller’s side. This style of photography represents different ethnicities, abilities, ages, and nationalities. Real people, real emotion. Never staged.
Details.
We show images that dig beneath the surface, using close-up shots to get to the joy of discovery. We focus on easily overlooked moments, off the beaten path, to capture texture and depth. These images should always be used to support a wider narrative.
For all our photography, we incorporate these principles to create an emotional connection with the traveller and leave a lasting impression of adventure.
Ensuring consistency
With the completion of the brand work, which was backed up with user research and data, we built an extensive set of brand guidelines. These covered everything from brand foundations (colour, grid, fonts, logo, bubble) through to brand expression (photography, video, tone of voice) and a full motion design system (stay tuned for a future post about this!).
But guidelines are not always enough to put a brand world into practice. To work as a companion piece alongside our guidelines, we also built extensive Figma/Canva templates. These helped ensure consistency… As mentioned earlier, brand recognition and muscle memory come from repetition.
Everything I’ve talked about here is just scratching the surface of what we implemented over a 12-month period. Creating a brand world for a billion-dollar company whilst trying to retain elements from an extremely over-complicated rebrand is a monumental task.
Hopefully by breaking down some of the core components and methodologies we used, you’ll have a stronger picture of the requirements of the task. Some parts have been oversimplified for the blog, but if you look at the cell structure underneath it all, you’ll have an idea of how we ensured that everything feeds into each other. All the cells live together to form the brand. It’s not just a collection of random components.
I’m really proud of how far we’ve come. We now have a consistent, recognisable, bold look and feel across most touch-points. There is still a long way to go, though. We’re starting to work with our product design teams to integrate the brand essence into the product, and with the introduction of our new motion design system, we will soon have a fully 360° design language deployed.
Exciting times ahead.
Keen to understand more about Design at Skyscanner? Get in touch!
If you’re looking for design roles, we have a few over on our careers hub, why not check them out.
Credits
Andre LeMasurier — Global Executive Creative Director
Ross Mawdsley — Global Head of Visual Design
Andy Culbert — Freelance Design Lead
Peter Dickinson — Head of Motion
James Bradley — Principle Creative Lead (Visual)
Belen Mielgo — Senior Designer (Brand)
Nicola Wilson — Senior Producer (Design Ops)
Adam Wilson — Principle Product Designer
And with help from https://www.re.design and https://www.washstudio.co.uk
