Too many cooks…

I had previously made the TLC website (a subsidiary of TLG), but this site was stepping up the majors. Stakeholders for this project were everyone from local PR reps, up to the CEO of TLG, so there was a very wide rage of buy-in that needed to happen…the phrase “too many cooks…” came to mind a lot.

A website having an existential crisis

Learning from the TLC website design, we established a clear POC within the company who could get ahold of high level stakeholders, or make decisions on their behalf. This simplified many things, and moved the project along quicker.

The website itself was based on the TLG branding, but with some more modern, less tech-focused accents. We pulled in the curves from TLC to separate any sections we could to represent our global reach, as well as give the site character.

The site was designed with six major user types in mind, which are represented under the “Who Am I” tab (investors were not listed). For the record, I fought very hard to not use “Who Am I”.

Each user type has a different end goal when on this site, so we needed distinct journeys for each.

WHO AM I!?!?!!

This project challenged me in many ways to grow as a design leader. I had not taken on a project this size, and I personally had several failures in my interactions with the team.

Despite the direct POC for stakeholder input, we still struggled with too many cooks in the kitchen. The POC should have been chosen more carefully or handled better by me, as this particular person was not very web-savvy and tended to give bad direction.

For this project, I took on a junior designer to help me, who caused more than a few problems. At the time I was still learning to manage creatives, and had yet to encounter a large ego. This was a very big and very painful learning curve for me.

Update: Since Travel Leaders was bought by Internova, the TLG site has been truncated to a glorified splash screen. So much for that project…