Case Study: HotelCard Service Illustrations. Digital Art for User Experience

In this design article, we invite you to take a brief glance at one more practical design case showing how illustration works to enhance user experience and brand communication. Let’s look at one of the creative and artistic tasks we worked on in our long-term collaboration with HotelCard, the service of special offers and discounts for travelers in Switzerland.

Client and Project

HotelCard is the market leader in discounted hotel offers in Switzerland, with a broad and diverse selection of hotel discounts and special offers. The service stands for sustainable regional travel, consciously supports local independent hotels, and promotes travel diversity. Handy and straightforward, the service is a win-win for both local hoteliers and their clients. So, HotelCard takes zero fees from hotels and, in this way, supports hundreds of small and family-owned hotel businesses, helping them improve their occupancy.

Earlier, we showed you the detailed story of how we worked on brand identity design for HotelCard.

That set the foundation for our long-term collaboration with HotelCard, and here we’ll unveil one of its parts, which is artistic and vibrant. One of our tasks was to create a big set of illustrations that would present the categories of hotels aesthetically and with solid emotional appeal in the process of digital interactions with the service.

The creative team that worked on that task included Maryna Solomennykova, Anastasiia Zhyltsova, and Olga Syrotkina, and animations for the case were accomplished by Ladamyra Kunytsa.

Theme Illustrations Pack

At this stage of work, the team was assigned to create an extensive collection of illustrations that would reflect the types of hotel offers that can be tried with HotelCard. The illustrations were intended to be used in service communication with customers in digital interaction on the web and mobile. So, the illustration artist had to find a stylistic approach that would be consistent for all the illustrations and, at the same time, would set distinguishing visual features that allow the users to quickly scan and catch the types of each offer. Also, the illustrations employed the brand color palette to keep the general consistency of the brand’s visual identity.

The illustrations had to capture the diversity of hotel categories and focus on their special features that may be essential and attractive for the clients, such as the accommodations being historical, waterfront, countryside, urban, offering facilities for sports or entertainment, etc. The artist used photos of actual hotels provided by the service and views around them as references for the illustrations.

As can be seen above, when creating the artwork, the illustrator and designer had to consider its placement on the cards or potential use in other interactions in combination with text elements. Here’s what the illustrations look like in the mobile interface.

All the effort resulted in the system of eye-pleasing graphics enhancing visual storytelling, emotional appeal, and usability to bring service users to an even more positive customer experience.

New design case studies from our team are coming soon. Stay tuned!