Travelex
Next Great Travel Writer

Next Great Travel Writer was the third in a series of three original projects I developed for Travelex as part of the Labs team at Hotwire. Travelex commissioned the series over a 12-month cycle—including Luxury for Less—to drive traffic and backlinks to their domain and boost SEO performance.

We created a Travelex-branded writing competition in partnership with Penguin Books aimed at helping young writers gain recognition. It was promoted through universities and the social channels of selected media partners. The winner received a creative session with a Penguin editor and £1,500 in prize money, with additional prizes awarded for the top student entry and a public vote winner.

As with our other Travelex projects, we were trusted to write the brief with a focus on generating site traffic and backlinks. We handled everything from stakeholder collaboration through to concept development, delivery, and PR. I was part of the initial idea development, working closely with the client team to explore directions before landing on the writing competition format.

The concept—targeting young and emerging writers, including university students—also allowed us to tap into backlinks from educational institutions and benefit from the SEO strength of .edu domains.

I drew on my experience working on the Prix Pictet photography competition to help shape the structure and timeline, building in regular engagement points for social and media outreach.

After securing Penguin Books as a partner, I led the development of the art direction. Each Travelex project was allowed its own identity, with a loose connection to their evolving guidelines. I explored two directions: one drawing on the rich visual identity of Penguin Books, inspired by Edward Preston Young and Jan Tschichold, and the other rooted in the visual language of travel—maps, landscapes, and the handwritten notes of a roaming writer.

Initially, the geometric, structured look of Tschichold’s Penguin identity—adapted for a long scrolling web page—offered the most promise. We developed our own metaphorical ‘spine’, ‘cover’, and ‘page’ layout, which translated into a menu, headings, and content structure respectively. This gave the experience a distinctive feel that nodded to Penguin’s heritage and the tradition of travel writing.

In place of Penguin’s classic colour palette, we used Travelex’s primary and secondary palettes. We paired their sans serif typeface, FS Me, for all informative content with Penguin’s original serif, Sabon, for all the creative writing. This combination helped users visually distinguish between functional and expressive content.

After a round of client feedback, we agreed that the ‘spine’, ‘cover’, and ‘page’ framework was unique, but needed softening. I introduced a layer of hand-drawn visuals based on our research into the travel writing aesthetic—evoking the kind of sketches and doodles that might fill the margins of a travel writer’s notebook. I created a suite of illustrations used across the site and marketing assets.

Once the design was signed off, I finalised the animation and transitions, briefed and supported the developers during build, and oversaw the production of supporting social media assets.

The long-term goal is for Travelex’s Next Great Travel Writer to evolve into a recognised literary prize for travel writing—and a platform to help launch the careers of the next generation of travel writers.