LONDON WORKSHOP:
COHESION AND SCALING VISUAL IDENTITY
Leaders across BRAND STRATEGY, DESIGN, PRODUCT & PHOTOGRAPHY convened in London for a DEEP DIVE on how we SCALE VISUAL IDENTITY across EXPEDIA, HOTELS & VRBO. (And blimey—we had fun.)
This London workshop launched a global alignment initiative to strengthen brand photography across product, search, email, and marketing channels—addressing inconsistent imagery, sourcing gaps, metadata challenges, rights management, and destination-level cohesion across a 1.3M-asset photo ecosystem.
I co-led the effort alongside partners in Brand, Product, UX, Media, SEO, Engineering, Legal, Localization, and regional market teams to define the full photo ecosystem: sourcing strategy, content coverage, governance frameworks, metadata standards, and cross-functional operating models.
Together, we established global visual standards, aligned regional teams around a shared vision for brand coherence, and identified systemic opportunities to improve image quality, discoverability, and scalability. As part of the initiative, I retrained high-volume photography vendors to deliver more sensory-attuned, brand-coherent imagery across product experiences and marketing channels.
The result was a stronger foundation for visual storytelling at global scale—connecting creative intent, customer experience, and technical infrastructure across Expedia Group’s brands.
Q:
How can you build cohesion when image sources range from original brand shoots, to rights managed, to royalty free, to partner imagery?
A:
Sharpen the visual language through before-and-afters. Bring Creative and Product teams together for workshops, open discussions, and shared decision-making. Align photography partners around each brand's distinct visual identity, then build the standards and systems to make that consistency repeatable.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
Scroll through the new visual frameworks below.
Strategic goal:
Build photographic consistency across all our touchpoints
to elevate the end-to-end traveler experience.
Tools & Systems:
How we create and sustain photographic
consistency across channels.
1. Delivering brand aesthetic within stock libraries.
We translated Expedia’s visual principles into shared sourcing and curation frameworks, creating a common visual language across stock partners and internal teams. This enabled a more distinctive, human, and brand-coherent aesthetic
to emerge consistently within high-volume royalty-free libraries.
The examples below show a “Paris in the Summer” brief across multiple stock partners,
along with before-and-after comparisons of evergreen travel themes.
2.Scaling brand photography through vendor enablement.
A visual identity only scales when the content ecosystem scales with it.
Tourism Media was a key destination photography partner supplying imagery across Expedia’s global platform.
In Fall 2022, we partnered with their leadership and photographer network to translate our new visual identity
into production-ready guidance that could be executed consistently across future shoots.
Through workshops, creative calibration sessions, and a phased adoption framework, we aligned
large-scale destination photo production with Expedia’s evolving brand standards.
The before/after examples here show how shifts in composition, storytelling, and sensory detail
helped create a more cohesive experience across the platform.
