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The Sesc hotels site shown across desktop and mobile, beside branded merchandise — a hoodie, umbrella, tote and honey jar.

3 hotels,3 cities1 robust design solution.

Redesigning a hospitality platform for a public institution — across three hotels, three cities, and one unexpected constraint.

Role
Lead Product Designer
Branding
Scope
Research · Prototyping · Visual Identity
Tools
Figma · Illustrator · Photoshop
Status
Shipped — Live

Hotels that exist to expand horizons

Sesc/RS mission

Promote socio-educational actions that contribute to the social well-being and quality of life of workers in the goods, services and tourism sectors, their families and the community — for a fair and democratic society.

Macro objectives

  • Modernize and strengthen the online presence of the Sesc/RS hotel network through a new website, responsive across all major devices.
  • Create distinct identities that characterize the three hotels while living under the same institutional brand umbrella.

Overview

Sesc/RS is a public institution in southern Brazil that promotes social well-being through culture, sports, and tourism. Their hotel network — three properties in Gramado, Torres, and Porto Alegre — had no unified digital presence: each hotel relied on an outdated, difficult-to-use website with no responsive design and a cumbersome reservation process.

Research

The most valuable phase was on-site technical visits to each hotel. Rather than designing from assumptions, I interviewed hotel staff — from front desk to management — to understand not just guest needs, but the internal operations a new digital product would need to support.

Key insights

  • The reservation flow was confusing and inefficient — guests struggled to complete it.
  • Each hotel had no consolidated visual identity, making them feel interchangeable when they weren't.
  • Communication needs varied significantly between properties — one hotel regularly hosted women's football teams, which shaped unique content and service priorities.
  • Hotel staff were producing communications manually, revealing a real need for a flexible content system.
Research artefacts pinned together: a Miro board of tagged findings, written notes for each hotel, and photographs from the site visits — among them a women’s football team the hotel hosted.

The defining constraint

Mid-project, the integration with a third-party reservation engine fell through. The transactional core of the product — the feature users would come to the site to use — was no longer available for launch.

Rather than shipping a broken promise or delaying indefinitely, I took this back to the research. Drawing on what I'd learned from hotel staff during discovery, I proposed an alternative: a structured pre-reservation flow that presented accommodations clearly and streamlined the submission of interest forms to hotel staff — who would then follow up directly.

User flow

From first visit to confirmed stay — mapped from the live product.

  1. 01 Network home

    Choose one of three hotels — Gramado · Porto Alegre · Torres

  2. 02 Hotel home

    Each with its own identity on a shared foundation

  3. 03 Rates & availability

    Stay dates + guests: adults, children, pets

  4. 04 Available accommodations

    Options and rates for the chosen period

  5. 05 Pre-reservation request

    A simple interest form — no payment step

  6. 06 Request reaches the hotel team

    Sent directly to the reservations staff

  7. 07 Personal follow-up → confirmed stay

    Staff contact the guest directly — the hotels' service advantage

Low-fidelity wireframes for the hotel site, laid out across desktop and mobile screens.
A walkthrough of the finished network home page: the three hotels — Porto Alegre, Gramado and Torres — each a photographic card carrying its own mark.
The finished Gramado site on desktop and mobile, with its logo studies.
Accommodation and rate screens from the prototype, shown on desktop and mobile.

Solution

The final product included responsive websites for all three hotels — desktop and mobile — with a clear information architecture, a pre-reservation flow that reduced friction without requiring a booking engine, and three distinct visual identities built on a shared component foundation.

Delivered

  • 60 screens prototyped across 3 hotels
  • 3 distinct visual identities (iconography, color, branded merchandise)
  • Responsive design across desktop, tablet, and mobile
  • Streamlined pre-reservation flow validated with hotel staff
  • Component-based design system supporting a CMS-ready structure

Branding

Research also made it clear that although the three hotels belong to the same company, each offers a different experience tailored to a distinct public. The managers all expressed the same need: each hotel had to look and feel like itself.

From those conversations I proposed creating brands that could live inside the larger Sesc-RS design system and visual identity.

Gramado

The hortensias that blanket Gramado every summer — their clustered, rounded petals forming soft geometric bouquets — became the central motif for the hotel's logo. I abstracted the flower's radial symmetry into overlapping rounded shapes, capturing the organic warmth and lush character of the region while keeping the mark clean enough to work across the Sesc-RS identity system.

The Hotel Sesc Gramado logo assembling: overlapping petal outlines turning inside a square frame, with the hotel name settling beside them.
The Hotel Sesc Gramado identity board: the brief, the mark built up from elliptical petal shapes to its final version, and a moodboard of the hotel, the town and branded pieces.
The Hotel Sesc Gramado building — brick and timber, with the Sesc sign above the entrance.
The hotel lounge: a stone fireplace, floral sofas and a timber ceiling.
Blue hydrangeas in close-up, with the logo’s construction geometry drawn over them.
Branded merchandise: a navy umbrella and hoodie beside a Hotel Sesc Gramado paper bag.
The paper bag against a yellow ground patterned with the mark.
A jar of honey labelled with the hotel’s branding.

Totems de serviço (implemented later)

Research also made it clear that although the three hotels belong to the same company, each offers a different experience tailored to a distinct public. The managers all expressed the same need: each hotel had to look and feel like itself.

From those conversations I proposed creating brands that could live inside the larger Sesc-RS design system and visual identity.

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