Responsive - Collaborative Task - Airbnb

Today we got briefed on the second part of the responsive module where we have to work in pairs or a group.

The Brief

Working as a creative partnership submit a response to one of the D&AD/YCN Students Awards briefs by the deadline stated. You will need to:

1 – Choose a creative partner or group based on the creative possibilities of your collaborative practice. Complete the collaborative practice form provided in order to identify your individual and joint interests, abilities, roles and responsibilities.

2 – Visit the D&AD/YCN website to find out more about the organisation, opportunities and resources available online.

3 - Select an appropriate D&AD/YCN Awards brief from the downloadable briefs section of the YCN site. Make sure you download any general information and specific brief related resources.

You will need to complete  the creative partnership form, project rationale and initial action plan before starting work on your selected brief.

In addition to the requirements external briefs, you are also required to document all aspects of your work - including development and your future considerations - for assessment.

For this project I have decided to work with Rory, Alec and Joe Boyd from Illustartion and we have to decided to choose one of the D&AD briefs: for Air BnB the brief is below.

Air BnB use the wording of "belonging" as one of there ways to communicate what they represent and want their customers to feel when they choose to use their service. 

We had an initial meeting to come up with some ideas for the project and how we could tackle it. As we have an illustrator on board this can really help us with widening what we can produce for the end product.

Our first meeting, notes and ideas.

Belong - Belong anywhere! 

Create a campaign using any platform/format.

-Video

-Print

-Advertising

-Unique experience

-Welcome pack

Words that we thought related to "Belong" and "Travel"

• Language
• culture 
• hosts
• Luggage, tags, bags, x-ray
• transport, planes, trains, cars, buses
• Landmarks
• Food/drink, tea/coffee/cultured food
• weather/hot/cold(smell)
• Noises
• Doors/opening/closing/windows 

Content?

Billboards/posters, which could be in places of travel such as trainstations and airports, bus stations etc

Stories, use excitsing air BnB customer stories and the stories that are given by the hosts of the owners of the places. 

Who is our target audience? 

Young people 18-26, existing and new customers. We cannot create something that only aims at a selected group it has to appeal to everyone who would want to and does use air BnB. 

Research

I started to have a look at the air Bnb website and to see how they already had sold their idea of belonging, looking at how we can tackle the brief differently and spot something that they may have missed.

 Air bnb have a very friendly tone of voice something that is very clear throughout their website and on all of their branding and advertising. This is something that I think we need to reflect in our own campaign and push across to the audience. The use of wording and phrases such as "welcome home" and "belong anywhere" really help to connect to the audience. 

 They have created a video which shows a story of a host interacting with their guests, and the friendly nature that they are aiming to put across to their target audience. 

 They use their logo and icon alot through the branding, the icon which they call the belo which has been re-created a number of times using illustration and applied to different aspects of their advertising. This is something that we will need to include into our own advertising campaign, and using the different styles and options they give through there brand guidelines. 

Research - Concepts

luggage is one of the most visceral images related to travel and could easily be referenced in the campaign. Briefcases and rucksacks are the most recognisable and widely associated with travel, and features like stickers and airline tags make the message clearer.

Postcards are another image that is associated with travel and links into the themes that the Airbnb brand embodies: human connection, personal touch, and travel itself. The hand rendered text in them also communicates the more personal connection and experience that Airbnb offers over traditional accommodation.

Windows and doors both represent housing and often a distinct difference between house windows and those of traditional holiday accommodation. They also represent a partition between the inside and out, which has the potential to be used as a way of expressing the idea of having a home anywhere you travel. Windows can also come in a variety of style that would give an indication of the location by the style of architecture, another feature that could be used to communicate travel.

Welcome mats, along with a host of other household items, can be used to communicate a sense of homeliness. an important part of Airbnb's selling point.

Research - Aesthetics
As we have decided to make postcards as a part of the printed pack for hosts/guests, as well as posters for magazine adverts, we needed to delve into some research. Here are different examples of visual research we have come across, which could take influence onto our final designs.

Air plane baggage label concept

This series of posters relates to our topic of travel and holidays within the air bnb project. The typography made up from 3 letter words on each ticket, replicating the actual baggage tickets, make up 4 different holiday phrases. This is a different way of advertising holidays, that we have not come across before. The way that they are all worn and used makes it better. 

The example on the right with hand rendered typography on top of an image creates an appealing aesthetic, which is used a lot more now a days in graphic design. Spreading out items like the poster on left is similar to ideas we have considered with regards our air bnb poster designs. The items are summer themed, and this is again similar to our own theme of travel. We were talking about using items from the home and place them from suitcases/baggage.

This poster makes use of the negative space well in creating another signifying visual representation. When the poster has turned upside down it reveals a 'terrorist' or a bad guy. Also the idea of including 2 messages within one poster is interesting. The design is subtle and colours are simple, making for an effective poster. 

Using a logo and just an image for a poster can sometimes be very powerful. Here pantone have used an image of a vibrant orange puddle and their logo. This technique is something we might consider when it comes to the posters. We have discussed using the photography studio at college to take photos of objects that could help represent our message of Air Bnb being welcoming, homely and making people feel like they belong abroad. So the final composition of the posters could include the potential photographs and an air bnb logo, if the image conveys the message well. 

An example of some white on black calligraphy. As of recent Alec has been using his experience with hand rendered type and calligraphy on different Air Bnb words, which we could use for our printed and digital designs. 

Another route we could take with the posters is to do something similar with these ones created for IBM. By using the bright colour scheme from the air bnb branding and create icons that convey the message of belonging to the audience, which would go alongside their logo.

Cityscape concept

After our first meeting all together we discussed with Joe the idea of incorporating different cityscapes inside the shape of a key, as keys are associated with 'home'. He has sketched some draft illustrations of this idea, however since then we decided not to along with this idea. 

These designs have been produced digitally in illustrator it seems, but also have a slight vintage aesthetic. The postcards include significant buildings from each of the cities and are represented stylistically in the forms of silhouettes. 

These illustrative postcards work well in representing their cities. The style on the left is a little twee and uses quite alot of different colours. The example on the right only uses 3 colours and makes for a more impactful design. The texture, simple colours and print aesthetic used on the right is more appealing than the one on the left in our opinion. We want to do something similar with our own postcards for air bnb. 

We want our postcards to resemble their cities and make the audience recognise the design and be familiar with them. Both of these designs use landmarks and city icons in them, they help represent the geographic location. 

  

Using hand rendered type over illustrated landscapes can produce good results. Although these are nothing like Ed Ruscha's work, they still create a nice look. Analog type is definitely going to be consistently used in our project.

These different sections of maps from big cities are colourful and detailed, but still remain effective. Designs like these, which obviously have had a lot of effort put in to them will want to be kept by those who receive them. The idea of the postcards for our printed pack is so that the guests either keep them as souvenirs or use them to send home, this means the designs/illustration will have to be appealing.

We met again on Thursday(26th) but without Joe as he wasn't available and spent half a day coming up with some ideas and getting the ball moving to where we can take this project. 

We put up a big sheet and just came up with a load of different ideas for the project.

We went over possible concepts for "Belonging"

-Welcome

-Shared

-Safe

Accepted

Target Audience

-Existing audience/community to grow new users 

Themes 

-Travel/Journey/maps

Belong anywhere.

• be welcome anywhere
• feel at home
• go on a journey with us
• take a journey 
• take your journey anywhere
• share your experience
• wish you were here
• be welcome anywhere
• make yourself at home 
• home from home
• you belong here
• belong therefor I belong

Formats

• Advertising 
• billboards
• posters
• apps
• animation
• photography
• magazine ads
• web page
• banner ads/digital/online
• interactive 

Create an advertising campaign for on/offline use

Our campaign.

An advertising campaign based around the phrase"you belong here" which is targeted at new and existing customers of air BnB to engage them to feel that they "belong with Air BnB.

We came up with the idea to create a welcome pack which Air BnB would give to their hosts and would include local knowledge and a map etc of stuff for their guest to look through. We had the idea to include a series of postcards for specific cities which we could get Joe to illustrate and include some type based ones too. An envelop which the pack would be in. And in terms of the digital side we would mock up an app which would be either part of the current Air BnB app or a new one which would act as a similar thing as the hard copy, including a map, local knowledge etc. 

We then thought that we could create some posters, and thought of the idea to create a photoshoot where there is a some luggage such as a suitcase and fill it with all things you would represent with home and add the type HOME,AWAY this being to represent that you dont need to take your home away on holiday and the Air BnB hosts should provide this when you choose to stay with them.

We listed some items that we thought related to travel and home.

Travel

Luggage 

tickets

passports 

postcards

flippers

snkorle 

shampoo

beach towel 

beach

sand

hat sunglasses

sun cream 

ice cream 

planes 

trains 

busses

taxi

money 

currency

Home

tea 

rugs 

keys 

family

slippers 

baths

food

dog pets

doorbells

windows

coffee

sugar cubes

pots pans 

beds

throws

sofas 

cushions 

tv 

films 

warmth

fires 

logs 

Juxtaposition situations

Situation 1
Suitcase, rug, tea, lamp - feel at home, away.  #BelongAnywhere

Situation 2
tea and biscuits 
You dont have to take your home abroad to feel at home.  
Dont take your home aboard to feel at home.


home,away


The Photoshoot
We booked a studio at uni, got together a load of items that we thought would look good from our lists and took them into uni and took some photos. We struggled with the flash and lighting as the remote triggers were really unpredictable but we managed to complete the shoot and got some really good photos that we were really pleased with. 

Alec edited the chosen images and started working on the posters and magazine ads which the posters would also be applied to. He used a hand made type for the "Home,Away" and "#Belong Anywhere" which will be applied to other aspects of the campaign.  

Elliot then started to work on the banner ads that we wanted to create for the digital aspect of the campaign. We had the idea to create a banner ad which would be seen on different websites as advertising getting the message across and using the same asestic within the posters of the hand rendered type and also including the air bnb logo branding.

These are the final four banner ads that Elliot created using the hand rendered type each poster uses the type in a different colour which has been taken from the brand guidelines as air bnbs colour palette. Each banner ad contains three images which we used from our own collection of images and put together using the skylines as a montage, this is to show the diversity of the different cities and places that you can go with Air Bnb and follows what we are aiming to achieve with our campaign.

Final Design Boards