Explora Islandia — Andrés Cardigni

Intro

Explora Islandia needed a website that could do something most tour operator sites don't: sell a premium, unfamiliar destination to a Spanish-speaking audience who'd never been there, based in a country most of them had only seen in photos.

Designing for Trust

This was a solo project designing the full web experience for a boutique tour operator based in Reykjavík, run by Luisvi Cristofori, a professional photographer with over 20 years of international experience. The core challenge was trust: a Latin American traveler booking an unfamiliar trip to Iceland through a small operator needs more reassurance than someone booking a well-known package deal, and the site had to carry that weight through design alone. I built it as a system — a home page anchored by a founder section, a featured tour, and the full six-tour catalog, plus individual detail pages for each tour with a repeating pattern of hero, key stats, a real photo gallery, and clear group/private booking CTAs — designed across desktop, tablet, and mobile, since most of the audience would be researching and booking from their phones. Part of the work was restorative: the existing brand elements were corrected and applied with judgment across every page, instead of being carried over as they were.

The Outcome

A complete, fully responsive site design ready for development — home page, six individual tour pages, and a founder-driven trust system — built to position the brand clearly in a competitive market: premium enough to justify the trip, approachable enough to book with confidence.

20years

Of the founder's career as a photographer, turned into the site's trust anchor

6 → 1

Six different tours solved with a single repeatable page pattern

Brand

Existing identity restored and its elements applied with judgment across the whole site, rather than inherited as they were

Reflection

This project reminded me that trust is a design problem before it's a marketing one. Every choice — photography, copy tone, the founder's face — was there to answer a question the visitor hadn't asked out loud yet: "can I actually trust these people with my vacation?" Designing six tour pages that each needed to feel individually crafted, without the system falling apart, was as much an exercise in restraint as it was in range.