Fauna Travel is a boutique agency planning wildlife and outdoor trips in Africa and the Americas. I developed the voice, the information architecture, the front-end code, and the WordPress theme from scratch. I built the site for the mindful luxury traveler with an emphasis on content creation and SEO to build an audience and generate weekly qualified leads that convert into safari travelers.
Deliver a luxury adventure travel product that builds enough trust with clients that they're comfortable spending $20,000+ on a safari designed by Fauna.
Let the design convey the feeling of mindfulness and trust on the website from the very start. Don't pressure with the hard sell, but engage people in clean and informative editorial content that also promotes a destination.
I spent seven years as Creative Director at Andrew Harper's Hideaway Report producing an unbiased editorial product, and I wanted to give a straightforward account of what I was selling, without the flowery language and tropes of other companies.
Navigation was simple and included: Destinations, Itineraries, Journal, About, Book Your Trip (CTA). Four are plain content nouns; only the CTA uses a verb, which makes it the single obvious action in the bar.
I've considered more ambiguous links like "Experiences," "Inspiration," "Why Fauna?" in the past and passed. They describe the marketing rather than the content, and they ask a visitor to decode them. I fall very much into the "Don't Make Me Think" UX school.
I try to keep the editorial voice elevated, straightforward, and slightly poetic in a way that reflects my own personality with an emphasis on readability. Content should be structured and informative to serve both SEO and the casual reader, while also yielding depth to those who want to spend more time with it. It also aims to demystify the travel industry by giving insider tips that boost sales, but are genuinely the best options out there.
Destination tiles use hand-drawn animals rather than photos. I didn't want to use stock images, and these are essentially big buttons. Illustrations convey a more classic, trustworthy brand, like the Wall Street Journal.
I'm a devout minimalist, and I wanted that to lead the whole project. The goal was to implement the site mindfully and give people clear information without overloading them. I believe where your attention goes, your life goes, so I want to be respectful of people's time — even the seconds dedicated to navigation decisions.
My idealist side made me hesitant to add anything that would slow users down — even modals or analytics. But the realist in me implemented it deliberately in the spirit of that restraint. Analytics is the clearest example: rather than reach for a full tracking stack, I implemented an anonymized, privacy-minimal setup that measures only what's useful and collects as little as possible. The test for anything new is always the same: does it serve a function, does it slow things down, does it respect the user?
Fauna is getting a larger revamp right now; this case study describes the site as it stands today. Even the redesign follows the same principle — clarity over density.
Photography and writing carry the site and generate organic leads that have helped grow the business. Below are some photos I selected for the site, among thousands of spectacular (and not so spectacular) images from lodge partners.
The Fauna Journal includes dozens of travel articles I researched and wrote myself. I specifically targeted more content to walking safaris and countries like Zambia, where I knew the bigger safari companies weren't as active. Content ranges from standard listicles to a few long-form "Just Back From" stories:
The work reaches past my own clients, and I developed safari training materials for Fora. I also hosted biweekly safari training calls for other advisors — walking them through the destinations, camps, and on-the-ground logistics that make a trip actually work.
Fauna is a solo agency, and generating weekly organic leads from content I created entirely by myself has been rewarding, since I'm up against a lot of industry players buying up all of the paid search.
Owning voice, information architecture, and implementation at once means no decision gets lost in a handoff. It also means no one pushes back, and I had to build my own discipline in place of that friction. The design's restraint isn't a stylistic preference — it's what happens when a designer is also the one who has to defend the choice to a real client with real money.
