AmericInn Branding Project
Client: AmericInn By Wyndham
Role: Designer / Design Direction / Product Designer
While I was a product designer at Wyndham, this was one of my favorite projects. At the time, Wyndham had acquired a new brand, AmericInn, to add to its ever-expanding family of brands. AmericInn's old website was very antiquated, and we needed to bring it to live the Wyndham way.
I started with the fonts, What Font face would AmericInn be for Wyndham. I pulled a variety of options that would work well for the site and added it to my mood board.
Next, I had to give the new brand some new colors. It's AmericInn right, I found a few versions of red, white & blue that would work well online and would be ADA compliant. That led me to a blue button; if you are not familiar with Wyndham brands, we have quite a few brands with blue buttons, let alone blue in their color palette at all. This was a welcome challenge; I brought all our blue buttons together on one page to see where AmericInn could stand out.
Imagery was next on the list. I thought of who the AmericInn customer is. Where do they stay? Words like Authentic, Genuine, Patriotic all came to mind.
Above is a one pager that I created to layout the colors and fonts that I presented to the brand. Along with demographics brand voice etc.
I pulled all kinds of imagery. Lifestyle, property shots that worked well in our responsive crops. Imagery can be tough; you have to pull consumers that the brand identifies. All imagery that was selected went into layouts so we could see how they crop. We treated the lifestyle images for this brand with a slight desaturation. We wanted the lifestyle imagery to look like family photos. Candids of people living there lives, on vacation, work trips, military, etc.
Being lead design on this project was an awesome experience. As a product designer who was also running and keeping the marketing projects going, this was a great chance to focus in a new way. Create a new brand style guide, take a brand and bring it into the Wyndham family renewed. It worked very closely with copywriters, producers, and it was enjoyable seeing this project from start to finish.