THE BACKSTORY
Halsbury Travel Group is a specialist educational travel company crafting creative itineraries to deliver exciting school trips both at home and abroad. Originally founded in 1986 by teachers who understood the very specific pressures of organising group trips within an educational context, the team today champion tailored trips that meet the needs of both curriculum, learning objectives and fun.
THE PROBLEM
The visual identity was outdated and failed to successfully reflect the company’s enthusiasm for travel, and their adventure-seeking personality. The website lacked a dedicated homepage, with no clear user journey to guide people to dedicated travel content, which resulted in a confusing customer experience. While the provision of trip solutions across so many different subjects, and locations across the globe, meant their website was weighed down with a lot of content that was hidden behind inconsistent navigation that was difficult to use.
THE SOLUTION
We kicked things off with a series of workshops to understand Halsbury Travel Group’s story so far – who they were, how they do things, their market positioning and how they differentiated themselves. This gave us great insight and allowed us to extract key themes that informed the brand strategy, brand architecture and subsequent visual identity.
Our approach to the visual identity started by developing a new logo that spoke to the personality behind the brand. We wanted something bespoke, approachable and playful. The final logo has been created with a hand-crafted typeface. The continuity and flow through each connected letter represents a journey – travelling through exciting new experiences. The brand colours were overhauled, replacing washed out pastels with a more vibrant mix of bold primaries and supporting secondaries.
The final significant aspect of the project was to re-design and build their website. Working closely with their marketing team we restructured the navigation – incorporating a new homepage and mega menu to give better visibility to previously hidden and hard to find pages. The approach to the web design was about making content more digestible. We introduced smarter ways to display information – creating more clearly defined sections within layouts, using accordions and carousels as well as breaking up content with playful illustrations and colour blocks.
