“Starwood re-launched the Luxury Collection’s website, giving the brand a new look and feel – replacing the old-fashioned look with a modern, sophisticated feel that still exudes luxury. In fact, while viewing the site, we felt we should be wearing a suit and tie, smoking a pipe, and petting a small dog.” – HotelChatter.com review
Awards:
Webby Awards Honoree – Travel category
Adobe – Site of the Day
WebAwards – Standard of Excellence
The redesign of LuxuryCollection.com, was done as a collaboration between my internal design group and BBDO Atmosphere and was the first step in re-creating the brand’s global visual language. Like with the work on the visual language the challenge was figuring out how to design a site that would bring together and make sense out of 69 different hotel brands and bring them together all under The Luxury Collection brand.
A collection through curation
The strategy for the site was to create an experience that would be like a museum, so it would be a clean gallery space where the diverse properties could be shown. But any gallery space would be curation by the brand that would bring the collection of different hotel brands together and make it have a cohesive point of view. So we approached the design like a museum where we valued the white space between the pieces of art, knowing that it would give each brand space to stand on their own, but it would pull everything together.
EXPLORE THE COLLECTION
Slivers of luxury
The Explore the Collection section brought this strategy to life with the properties displayed as a kinetic slivered work of art against a large white background mirroring the way works of art line the walls of a museum. You can either explore the slivers by rolling over them or search interactively by Destination or Pursuit which will narrow down the numbers of slivers displayed with each choice. Other highlights include destination guides that convey the brand’s indigenous destination expertise and a Global Cultural Calendar that allows guests to tailor their travel plans around major global events.
MOBILE WEB
It comes in compact sizes too
I also spent a year designing a mobile web version of The Luxury Collection site and all 9 of Starwood brand sites. This was done because the desktop site was optimized to work on tablets, so the site is served to desktop and tablets while the mobile web version is given to all mobile phones.
