Virgin Holidays Unleashed

Project impact:

The bold, interactive app experience for Virgin Holidays was a finalist for an international design award.

Overview:

Virgin Holidays wanted a way to inspire customers and help them imagine their next adventure before they even packed a bag. The result was Unleashed — a relaxed, scrollable app designed to be explored from the comfort of a sofa or sun lounger.

As Design Director, I led the visual direction and user experience of the app, making sure the experience felt both bold and easygoing. We used a combination of striking photography, playful animation, and rich editorial content to create a lean-back experience that brought destinations to life.

Challenge

Creating an immersive digital experience that could evoke the feeling of a holiday while still aligning with business goals.
Balancing high-end visuals and interactivity with performance across a wide range of tablets.
Making the lean-back experience feel exploratory and inspiring while supporting key booking objectives.

Solution

Directed the overall art direction and interaction design to reflect Virgin Holidays’ bold, energetic brand.
Integrated animated transitions and interactive elements to create a laid-back, playful feel.
Ensured a strong typographic hierarchy and brand consistency, while giving each section a distinct identity — echoing the sense of exploration you get when discovering somewhere new.

Results

The app was nominated for an international design award.

It combined editorial storytelling and brand marketing in a way that felt fresh, interactive, and visually distinctive.

Reflections

This project was designed during a more experimental era for touch-optimised tablet publishing — a time when the rules were still being written, and creativity often took precedence over convention. While not everything would necessarily pass today’s standards for stripped-back UX, at the time it was all the more exciting for that, and I was a finalist for Designer of the Year at the International Content Marketing Awards that year largely because of it.

Unleashed offered the chance to explore a rich, immersive, and editorially-led experience that gave users something to play with. It felt fresh and ambitious at the time, and still stands out as a creative swing that helped shape my thinking around interactive storytelling.

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