Giving Booking.com a design language that finally felt like a brand
I led the creation and rollout of a new visual design language across all Booking.com platforms — web, iOS, Android — and then got 150 product teams across 7 brands to actually ship it.
A design system that worked — but had no soul
Booking.com had a competent design system. It was functional, consistent, and well-adopted. What it didn't have was personality. There was zero brand feel — no warmth, no character, nothing that said "this is Booking.com" instead of "this is a travel website." The visual language had aged, and while the system kept the product coherent, it did nothing to make it feel like something people would connect with.
For a company that touches millions of travellers every day, that gap mattered. The product experience was efficient but forgettable. We needed a design language that could carry the brand — not just organise the UI.
Lead Designer
I led a core team of 3 designers to define every layer of the new visual language — colour, typography, iconography, layout, illustration, photography. We worked closely with the design systems team for technical support, but the creative direction and the foundational decisions were ours.
The work wasn't just design, though. A big part of the job was influence without authority: convincing dozens of autonomous product teams across 7 brands to put this on their roadmaps and spend real engineering hours on a visual refresh. No one reported to us. We had to earn every adoption.
From colour tokens to hundreds of shipped screens
Defining the building blocks
This was the nerdy part — and honestly the most satisfying. We started from first principles: a colour system that could carry brand personality while still meeting accessibility standards. A type scale that worked across platforms. An icon set with a consistent optical weight and a point of view. Layout rules and spacing patterns that brought rhythm and breathing room to screens that had historically been packed with information.
No part of the visual experience was left unchanged. We figured out early on that we also needed a new illustration style and a refined approach to photography. If we were going to do this, it had to be complete.
Getting 250 designers to care
You can't hand 250 designers across 150 product teams a new visual language and expect them to adopt it because you asked nicely. We ran co-creation sessions to bring people into the process — not just to get feedback, but to create genuine ownership. If designers across the company felt like this was partly theirs, they'd fight for it on their own teams.
This phase produced a high-fidelity vision that people could rally around: not a style guide PDF, but a tangible picture of what Booking.com could look and feel like.
Making it real inside a complex design system
The design system at Booking.com didn't just serve one brand. It supported the main product plus adjacent brands like Rentalcars.com and white-label apps. So the new language couldn't be hardcoded — it had to work as a theme layer, flexible enough to carry different brand expressions on the same underlying components.
This was deeply technical design work: making sure every token, every component variant, every spacing decision could flex across themes without breaking.
The hardest part: getting it shipped without a single engineer on our team
We updated all Booking.com platforms — web, iOS, Android — working through hundreds of screens. The catch: we didn't have any engineers. Every line of code was written by other teams' developers, on their time. That meant the real work was making the case, team by team, that this mattered enough to prioritise. Influence in the absence of direct authority — that was the actual hard skill this project required.
Three things that made a company-wide redesign actually land
Redesigning a visual language is one thing. Getting a massive organisation to adopt it is an entirely different problem. These are the principles that made the difference:
Make it theirs, not yours
The co-creation sessions weren't a PR exercise. We genuinely incorporated feedback and gave designers across the company a stake in the outcome. When people feel ownership, they become advocates — and we needed 250 advocates, not 250 people waiting to be told what to do.
Be complete or don't bother
A half-updated brand is worse than an outdated one — it just looks inconsistent. We made the deliberate choice to touch everything: colour, type, icons, illustration, photography, layout. If a user could see it, we redesigned it. That completeness is what made the result feel like a real transformation rather than a coat of paint.
Build for the system, not just the screen
Every decision had to work at system scale — across platforms, across brands, across themes. A colour that looked great on web but broke on Android dark mode wasn't a solution. This discipline slowed us down in the short term but is exactly why the system has held up for four years with barely a change.
Influence without authority at a company with 150 autonomous teams
Booking.com's culture is radically decentralised. Product teams own their own roadmaps, their own priorities, their own backlogs. Nobody was going to allocate engineering time to a visual refresh just because a central design team asked them to.
So we had to sell it — team by team, lead by lead. We showed how the new language would improve their specific product area. We made adoption as easy as possible by working with the design systems team to bake the new tokens into existing components. And we made the vision compelling enough that designers within those teams became our internal champions.
It worked. But it was slow, and it required patience and persistence that no Figma file can teach you.
What I learned leading a visual transformation at scale
This project taught me that craft and influence are inseparable at scale. You can define the most beautiful, well-reasoned design language in the world, but if you can't get a hundred teams to care about it, it stays in Figma forever.
I also learned the value of completeness. Touching every surface — colour, type, icons, illustration, photography — meant the transformation felt real the moment it shipped. There was no awkward in-between state where half the product looked new and half looked old.
Four years later, the system is still largely unchanged. That's the metric I'm most proud of — not because change is bad, but because it means we got the foundations right. We built something durable enough that teams could keep building on top of it without needing to start over.