Brand Guidelines / Design system / Layout / Iconography / Cross-team collaboration

The evolution of our brand continues! Like all things, Expedia Group’s brand identity is iterative and always improving. We even changed what we called this, going from “Brand Guidelines” to “Brand Standards” in order to alter the perception employees had when they referenced this important material.

In 2024, my team and I took our existing Brand Standards and made many changes, taking into consideration all of the feedback we gathered from 60+ stakeholders over the past year. This time we really challenged ourselves by answering the “why” behind our design decisions. I spent a week in a design immersion workshop where we explored new ways to scale our branding (our “scale of expression” allowed our brand to stretch depending on whether a layout had to remain simple or highly creative).

This was a huge body of work consisting of 170 pages total. As you scroll down, you will see some of my favorite pages.

Art direction, copy & management: Lisa Perkovic / Design, layout & copy: Molly Martin, Petros Afshar, Gunjan Joshi, Atlas Winter / Project management: Annie Mullins / Design stakeholders who gave valuable input: Tyler Parker and Liz Ong

So much strategic thinking went into this work because we knew it had to serve both non-designers as well as agencies that already understood design language.

We used to have four logo versions but I worked with stakeholders to eliminate one so that we could simplify our offering

We do something unique at EG where we treat photography as a color. This was an intentional choice to emphasize the importance of the warmth and humanity in photos.

The question "why is blue our primary color" kept coming up, so we wanted to address this in our Brand Standards

Connecting our colors to these principles made it easier to show users when and WHY it's appropriate to use certain colors in certain amounts

Angella-Watterson_EG_brandStandards_Photography_Inclusion.png

We treat photography like a color and remind users that even though we have limited brand colors, this is the area you can really make a layout feel colorful and engaging

Brand Guidelines / Design system / Layout / Iconography / Cross-team collaboration

So much strategic thinking went into this work because we knew it had to serve both non-designers as well as agencies that already understood design language.

We used to have four logo versions but I worked with stakeholders to eliminate one so that we could simplify our offering

We do something unique at EG where we treat photography as a color. This was an intentional choice to emphasize the importance of the warmth and humanity in photos.

The question "why is blue our primary color" kept coming up, so we wanted to address this in our Brand Standards

Connecting our colors to these principles made it easier to show users when and WHY it's appropriate to use certain colors in certain amounts

We treat photography like a color and remind users that even though we have limited brand colors, this is the area you can really make a layout feel colorful and engaging

Employees often didn't understand which shapes were better to use when framing a photo, so we really focused on showing clear examples.

Playing with our scale of expression allowed us to stretch our branding when needed without breaking any rules

I created all of the example mockups you see on each page in Adobe Illustrator before finalizing the layouts in Canva

We showed the importance of using white space in layouts and how to effectively use our brand blue so that it doesn't feel overwhelming

Expedia Group Brand Standards

Brand Guidelines / Design system / Layout / Iconography / Cross-team collaboration

So much strategic thinking went into this work because we knew it had to serve both non-designers as well as agencies that already understood design language.

We used to have four logo versions but I worked with stakeholders to eliminate one so that we could simplify our offering

We do something unique at EG where we treat photography as a color. This was an intentional choice to emphasize the importance of the warmth and humanity in photos.

The question "why is blue our primary color" kept coming up, so we wanted to address this in our Brand Standards

Connecting our colors to these principles made it easier to show users when and WHY it's appropriate to use certain colors in certain amounts

We treat photography like a color and remind users that even though we have limited brand colors, this is the area you can really make a layout feel colorful and engaging

Employees often didn't understand which shapes were better to use when framing a photo, so we really focused on showing clear examples.

Playing with our scale of expression allowed us to stretch our branding when needed without breaking any rules

I created all of the example mockups you see on each page in Adobe Illustrator before finalizing the layouts in Canva

We showed the importance of using white space in layouts and how to effectively use our brand blue so that it doesn't feel overwhelming