Creating a distinctive identity for a new cruise holiday brand
Sussex Cruise Club was a new cruise holiday business created by Woods Travel in Bognor Regis, offering customers a curated range of cruise holidays from leading operators including P&O, Fred Olsen, Cunard and Royal Caribbean.
I was brought in to develop the brand identity and supporting marketing communications, creating a visual language that could establish Sussex Cruise Club as a credible, welcoming and aspirational travel brand.
The first major application of the identity was this customer-facing newsletter brochure, designed to bring together cruise offers, destinations and holiday information in an engaging and easy-to-navigate format.
Building the brand from the ground up
As a newly established business, Sussex Cruise Club needed an identity that could immediately communicate its position within the travel and cruise market.
I developed the logo, typography, colour palette and wider visual language, establishing a consistent foundation that could be carried across future marketing materials.
The identity needed to feel premium enough to reflect the aspirational nature of cruising, while remaining approachable and accessible to a broad audience of holidaymakers.
The resulting visual system provided Sussex Cruise Club with a recognisable presence and gave the business a consistent framework for communicating its cruise offering across different channels.
Turning information into an engaging travel experience
The newsletter brochure was designed to do more than simply list available cruises.
It needed to inspire customers while also communicating a considerable amount of practical information, including cruise destinations, itineraries, operators, holiday details and promotional offers.
I created a structured editorial layout and flexible page template that allowed a variety of content to be presented consistently throughout the brochure.
Supplied copy and imagery were carefully organised into clear sections, using typography, colour, imagery and spacing to establish hierarchy and guide the reader through the content.
This approach helped transform a potentially information-heavy collection of cruise offers into something that felt more like an inspiring travel publication.
Designing for an aspirational audience
Cruise holidays are inherently visual and emotional: the destination, ship and experience are often just as important to the customer as the practical details of the holiday itself.
I therefore used the brochure’s imagery prominently, allowing destinations and cruise experiences to provide the visual hook, while the typography and colour palette created consistency across the different sections.
The design balanced aspiration with accessibility — encouraging customers to imagine themselves on the holiday while making the information they needed to make a purchasing decision straightforward to find.
Creating a flexible design system
A key consideration was ensuring that the identity could work across different types of content and cruise operators.
The brochure needed to accommodate different imagery, amounts of copy and promotional messages without losing its sense of consistency.
The resulting template provided a flexible framework that could be adapted for multiple cruise offers while maintaining a recognisable Sussex Cruise Club aesthetic.
This is an approach I have continued to use throughout my career: creating design systems that provide consistency without becoming restrictive, allowing content to remain the focus while ensuring the overall communication feels considered and cohesive.
The result
The first Sussex Cruise Club newsletter established how the new brand could work in a substantial piece of customer communication, bringing together the newly created identity, editorial design and supplied content into a cohesive customer experience.
The project demonstrates my ability to take a brand from initial identity development through to real-world application, creating both the visual foundations and the communication framework needed to establish a new business.
It also demonstrates an aspect of design that has remained central to my work throughout my career: taking a large amount of information and structuring it into communication that is clear, engaging, visually appealing and commercially effective.
My role
Brand identity • Logo design • Typography • Colour palette • Art direction • Editorial design • Information design • Layout design • Print production
Deliverables
Sussex Cruise Club brand identity • Logo • Visual identity system • Newsletter brochure • Editorial template • Customer marketing collateral
