Lab 09 / archetype four, six routes, and a constraint that changes everything
Six routes: the quotation, the itinerary, the vouchers, the delegate pack, the flyer and the published table. Unauthenticated, opened from a token link, usually on a phone, by somebody who has never used Tripbooks and never will.
And here is the thing that decides the whole design: these pages carry the agency's brand, not ours. A traveller sees Northline Travel, or Northline, or whoever sold them the trip. Tripbooks appears nowhere. So this is not a design, it is a skin: a document that has to be well set with any tenant's colour dropped into it, and still look like the most expensive thing that agency has ever sent.
Everything decided for the operator side, thirty-one pixel rows, ten columns, badges, hatched fills, is wrong here. What carries over is the three faces and the discipline. What does not is every unit of density.
01 / the quotation, as the customer receives it
Accepting confirms this itinerary at these prices, on the terms above. You will be asked to sign electronically, and we will send confirmations as each part is secured.
No supplier is named anywhere: the hotels are named because the customer is staying in them, but the wholesaler that priced the room is not, and neither is any internal identifier. The only reference shown is your reference with us, and when the hotel's own confirmation number arrives it will be added beside it, because that is the number a traveller actually needs at a front desk. And the validity block does not say "valid for 7 days". It says which parts are contractually fixed and which parts the airline can move, because a quotation that over-promises on a fare is the single most expensive thing an agency can send.
02 / the skin test
One token changes. If the design only works in one colour, it is not a platform surface, it is a brochure for one customer.
Exactly two things: a logo mark and one brand colour. Everything else, the type, the scale, the rhythm, the way validity is stated, is the platform's and it does not move. That is not a limitation, it is the product: an agency of four people gets a document that looks like it came from an agency of four hundred, and the platform can guarantee that the honest bits stay honest.
The validity block, the reference line, and the absence of supplier names. Those three are compliance surfaces rather than design surfaces. An agency that could delete the "may change" tag on a fare would delete it, and the first time an airline repriced, the platform would be the reason a customer was misled.
03 / where it is actually opened
The token link arrives by email or WhatsApp, so the phone is the primary case and the desktop is the courtesy. The item row loses its time column and stacks, the validity lines wrap under their tags, and nothing else changes.
04 / the contract for every customer facing page
Money is still mono, and the totals still align on the decimal. On a dense register that was a legibility decision. Here it is a trust decision: a price set in the same face as the surrounding sentence reads like a claim, and a price set in a ledger face reads like an account. For a document that is asking somebody to commit two hundred thousand dollars, that difference is worth more than the aesthetic consistency it costs.
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