OUGD503: Vector Illustrations

While looking on the Airbnb website for photographic inspiration to inform the illustrations, we found several photos with a range of different views which we thought fully represented the kind of places customers of Airbnb can stay on their holidays or trips away.  We tried to include a variety of locations, from beaches to mountains to street views.  

Using these photos as a reference I took on the role of making some rough sketches, changing the perspective so the appearance is almost completely flat, unifying all the illustrations.  These were mainly to create the best possible composition and to work out the tones, and to make sure that each drawing was of a consistent style and showed a broad range of scenery before moving on to the computer to digitise them. We split this task between us, taking three or four to vectorise each.

We looked at the colour palette in Airbnb's guidelines, and chose 5 colour variations to make these illustrations, as we felt this provided enough alteration throughout the booklet. We tested out all the colours in Airbnb's brand guidelines to begin with, but chose not to include the lighter shades such as the peach coloured 'ebisu' because when the whole image is changed to 50% opacity on the InDesign document, the lighter shades weren't contrasting enough when printed against the white background.

Our initial thought was to include 50 spreads, which would give space for 50 different stays using Airbnb.  We discussed this and based on how thick the passport would need to be, plus the reality that 50 trips away from home is quite a lot (and we want to keep users engaged with the Airbnb passport), we have opted for 20 double page spreads.  Each illustration will cover one double page spread, and is recommended that for each stay one spread is used.

From the initial drawings, we split the task of vectorising these into block shapes to create the images. We used variations of opacity per 10%, ranging from 10% - 90% to show depth and perspective.  Originally we planned to use more than one colour in each illustration, but decided that this would deter focus from the writing and become too complex as a background image.

On some of the designs (such as the curtains in the one below), areas of the design were kept as a low opacity over the rest, whereas most of the design was divided so that overlapping shapes didn't show through the different opacities.  By keeping it reduced to block shapes we were able to produce clean and simple designs.

We added semi circle cut outs in the centre of either side of the spread, which gave us space to put the page number on the right and AirBnB logo on the left.  The colour of these icons will match the colour of the illustration on that page.  The 10mm border is consistent on every page.

Altogether we created 10 different illustrations, which will each appear twice in the passport.  Each of the 5 colours is used twice.  Below are the earlier versions before matching up the pairs of colours.  We also had made another illustration but decided it was a bit too complex to fit with the rest of the scenes and didn't follow the same degree of minimalism.  Instead we opted for a design that showed a partial section of architecture and surrounding scenery - as most of the illustrations do.