Skift IDEA Awards
Creating the New Gold Standard in Travel
2014 - present
Innovation, Design, and the Future of Travel
Skift’s founder and CEO challenged me to create an industry awards program that would stand out in the market, cut across travel sectors, and celebrate the brands and designers making the end-to-end travel experience better for consumers. I answered with the Skift Design Awards.
The Skift Design Awards recognizes transformational design experiences across the traveler journey.
The awards honor leading work from the brands, agencies, and tech providers who create exceptional experiences for the modern traveler — from architecture to interiors, digital to events, tech to transportation, and everything in between. Positioned around holistic, human-centered design principles and a focus on the quality of travel experiences through the lens of the consumer, the Skift Design Awards has quickly become the industry’s most sought-after recognition.
To challenge the travel industry to think more broadly about the holistic nature of design, I wrote the Skift Design Manifesto (see case study) and assembled a diverse panel of all-star judges, each of whom celebrated as design leaders in their respective fields:
Yves Behar — Founder & CEO, Fuseproject
Liz Lambert — Founder & Chief Creative Officer, Bunkhouse
Jen Rubio — Chief Brand Officer, Away
Jan Chipchase — Founder, Studio D
Lindsey Maxwell — VP, Teague
Kristy Tillman — Head of Experience Design, Slack
Joe Geis — Global Head of Art & Graphics, WeWork
Colin Nagy — Head of Strategy, Fred & Farid
Scrapping the notion of a typical awards ceremony, we opted to present the night celebrating design through a panel discussion between renowned hotelier Ian Schrager (Studio 54, Palladium, Edition) and Debbie Millman, host of the Design Matters podcast. In between, we played video interstitials to reveal the winners and showcase their work from the stage.
The Skift Design Manifesto
Elevating the Role of Design in Travel
In today’s consumer-centric world, where experiences, personal fulfillment, and transformative moments are revered as the ultimate currency, the role of design — in every sense of the word — has never been more important.
The Skift Design Manifesto is a brief guide to understanding the elevated role of design in travel, its application to the traveler experience, and its implications on business transformation and customer loyalty. I wrote this deck to provide thought leadership and guidance to the travel industry, overlapping with marketing efforts around the 2019 Skift Design Awards launch.
