Brand, Design and Storytelling Strategies for Tourism

Tips to Inspire Potential Customers!

The visual appearance of your website and marketing collateral play a vital role in creating positive first impressions, enticing your target audience, and converting them to bookings. Your branding, design elements, and brand story all work together to showcase what your business offers.  

In this article, we'll explore five tips recommended by our lead designer, Pallavi Karambelkar that will help support your visual branding, designs and storytelling. We also share a recording of our Tourism Tech Talks webinar hosted by Pallavi that covers these strategies along with additional questions from tourism businesses.

1. Something New: Horizontal Scrolling

Horizontal scrolling on a website is an emerging design feature that presents featured content with a horizontal scrolling action to view more, rather than the traditional vertical scrolling. We see this being used a lot on smartphone apps like Netflix, so with this familiarity, it is now becoming a new design feature for websites.

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What we think

Overall we think this is a design feature to keep an eye on as it has great potential for tourism businesses to showcase your beautiful images and video, taking people on a journey to imagine them experiencing what you offer.

• Unique & attractive - your website will stand out and be memorable for users
• Magazine style - the content displayed can be a mix of big images, videos and text 
• Takes users on a journey - as they scroll through the content they learn more as you share your story
• It's not asking for a new behaviour from the user - users still scroll vertically as normal but the content moves horizontally
• Adventurous, goes beyond the safe option - as a new way to present content on a website it may surprise people, but if done well it will be worth it!
• Choose it for the right style of content - not ideal for content that needs to be text heavy or say an ecommerce site but we think it is perfect to showcase the dream stage of travel to inspire travellers!

2. Something Reliable: Your Story

• Every brand has a story! It is stories that people will remember rather than facts because they create connections, offer authenticity and build trust. Read the Tomahawk story.
• Your brand story will share your WHY rather than your WHAT. Why did you start your business? What is your passion? What are your values? Share the same values and story consistently to avoid confusion.
• Sharing of your brand story and values can be done by weaving them into all aspects of your communications - in your logo, on your website, in your "tone of voice", in your hashtags, how you respond to emails, and so on!

Craft your brand story in 4 steps 

3. Something Underrated: Fonts

Fonts offer so much for brands but are often not mentioned. Each font has a personality and can evoke emotion and relatability. A good typography should almost seem invisible because they do a job at a subconscious level. 

You should choose a font type that matches your brand personality, and it is quite common to use 2 complimentary font styles in your brand - for example, a serif font for headings and a highly legible sans serif font for body text.

Font categories

• Serif: old style, formal & serious, professional, sophisticated, upmarket. e.g times New Roman. Used by FLOCKHILL
• Sans serif: geometric & simple, professional, young, modern, high legibility, trending e.g Arial. Used by Visit Ruapehu
• Script: adds flourish & flow, great for accents and highlights, low on legibility, use sparingly e.g Brush script. Used by Ranginui Retreat 
• Display: strong personality, great for making brands memorable, low legibility, only used in large sizes e.g Shadow fonts. Used by Air Chathams

Font providers

There are now many font providers who you can source fonts from, both free and paid. 

Font licensing

• There are different types of licensing for fonts - open source, one-off payment, and subscriptions
• When selecting a font do your research to check whether there is a requirement to purchase your font or not 

Find out more in our Brand & Design eBooks!

4. Something DIY: Creating a Brand Kit in Canva

Canva is a popular DIY online tool for creating marketing collateral designs - anything from social media posts and reels to brochures and website graphics. There is a specific feature in Canva which allows you to set up your own "brand kit" so that you can then easily and consistently apply your branding across all of your designs.  

A brand kit is essentially your set of "ingredients" in order to create a design including your brand logo, colours and fonts, like the example below. To view a demo on how to set up a brand kit in Canva, watch the webinar video from 40 minutes onwards. If you need some help with setting up your brand kit in Canva, have a look at our Brand Kit Package.

5. Something Trending: Accessibility 

Accessibility in the sense of user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) means a design is "inclusive" so that a broad range of people can use your content. Which means that people who are less able (whether it be temporary or permanent) are not disadvantaged when viewing your website.

People with poor eyesight or colour blindness for example, can find certain designs too challenging to view so designers need to use ''accessible" design principles taking in to account aspects like colour and contrast, spacing and size of fonts and buttons. 

Additional Resources

The webinar created questions from attendees about the branding and storytelling. Watch the video below and review these Q&A answers to learn more.

We offer a range of brand and design packages for tourism businesses catering to different needs and budgets!

Webinar Video

You'll find all of these strategies discussed on our Tourism Tech Talk webinar about Brand, Design & Storytelling. Pallavi and host Gina Paladini share these in detail along with tourism examples and answering questions from tourism businesses.