Civitatis is a digital company dedicated to providing services for the holiday tourism industry. It is organized into two lines of business: tourist guides and complementary services like hotel reservations and excursions.

In 2014, the total traffic on the group’s websites reached 40 million visits and more than 150 page views. In 2015, more than 600,000 people booked some type of service through Civitatis, a fact that cemented its leadership in the “Tours & Tickets” sector.

The company decided that 2016 would be the year for it to make a qualitative strategic jump, with plans that included the opening of a physical store, the launch of Apps, updating its websites, and internationalization, among other things. Erretres played a key role in this growth with a global rebranding project created to improve the brand’s positioning, as well as attract new clients, promote customer loyalty and update the brand design to meet current trends, in order to create a solid brand commensurate with the company’s size and vision.

The project kicked off with a research, analysis and strategy period that ended up being a “journey” through all the companies that offer different services in the tourism industry. This led to the definition of a brand concept that is both differentiating and unique in this field.

The project consisted of changing the logotype through the application of a new, more modern and more direct typography, the choice of the color “strawberry”, and the development of a rich graphic universe (both in terms of visual and photographic resources), as well as its application to a series of pieces that include everything from printed materials to graphic advertising, the corporate website, associated websites, the App, physical spaces, merchandising, etc

One of this project’s challenges consisted of organizing the large ecosystem of web domains that comprise the company’s different .com and .es sites, which are associated with the different destinations. The idea was to do it in such a way so as to direct traffic towards the central Civitatis brand, without adversely affecting the immense value of the already up-and-running URLs.

To this end, a complete organizational system was configured.

The Civitatis universe has two derivatives. On the one hand, there is the Civitatis corporate brand (represented by the website civitatis.com), and on the other, there are all the sub-brands – each of which represents a different destination like London, Madrid, New York or Japan. The corporate brand uses the system of waves, the color “strawberry” and the corporate typography, while the destinations are principally depicted using images of the destination and a range of typographies that are clearly suggestive of the origin. For the project, it was extremely important to clearly articulate these two languages, given that 90% of total views of Civitatis websites come from destination urls: These must maintain a more editorial and less corporate style, in keeping with the guides they are.

In order to give the brand a distinctive identity in such a fragmented market – characterized by generating creative concepts that are based purely on an image of the destination and a big promotional claim –, we sought to generate a unique visual system that would accompany and lend dynamism to all of the brand’s communications.

We opted to base it on a simple concept: any other service from the tourist destinations directs you from point A to point B without any problems, tracing the shortest and most simple distance: a straight line.

Civitatis can also take users from point A to point B, while giving them a singular, enjoyable and complete user experience. You could say that the trajectory might be more similar to the curve of a smile than a straight line.