Objective
Clearly demonstrate the routes and destinations that Sun Country Airlines services, while keeping the corporate communication tone. This creative is used acrossed several channels including: print, social media, digital and interactive.
Sun Country Airlines Route Map
Challenge
There are text contrast requirements that need to be met for this project because it is displayed on suncountry.com, the corporate e-commerce website. The U.S. Department of Transportation mandates WCAG 2.0 AA Accessibility Standards be met on all airline carrier websites. Part of these requirements is a text contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for small text.
Solution
The first step in the design was determining the color palette. As a starting point, I took the corporate colors and utilized a Colour Contrast Analyser to test the foreground / background contrast ratio.
The primary brand color is a dark blue color (#004785), which has plenty of contrast with a white text.
The secondary brand color is a light blue color (#1593cc), this does not pass the required 4.5:1 contrast ratio with white or the primary blue. By adjusting the color to a darker tone (#1273a5), it accommodates the contrast requirements with white.
Since both of the blues are compliant with white, but not with each other, the blues became the background colors.
The tertiary brand color is a bright orange (#ee7624), which also does not pass the required 4.5:1 contrast ratio with white. This color was very important to keep as true as possible, as a shift in shade dramatically changes the mood. Contrast requirements are only for text elements, allowing us to use this tertiary color as the location markers and route lines.
Usability & Readability
Sun Country Airlines is branded as Minnesota's Hometown Airline™. It seemed only appropriate to use the Sun Country Compass logo as the Minneapolis/St. Paul location marker.
The majority of the flights are to/from Minneapolis/St. Paul; as the company continues to grow there are more origin points. To help differentiate the routes that originate at a seperate origin, they are marked with a darker shade of orange.
Sun Country Airlines Destinations—Image Map
Image Map
On Sun Country's website, the above image is displayed as an HTML image map, on the Travel Destinations page. The experience takes the user to the destination's landing page when a location marker or location label is clicked.
