Carpe Diem Tours

Design System · Web Design · Web Development · Optimisation · Stationery Design

[ SCOPE OF WORK ]

Design system — full component library and token framework, UI component documentation and usage guidelines, Website UX research and information architecture, Full website UI design — all pages and templates, Multi-city page architecture and tour catalogue design, Booking flow UX and conversion design, Custom web development Multi-currency integration, Performance engineering and Core Web Vitals optimisation, Technical SEO foundations , Stationery and print design

[ INDUSTRY ]

Tourism & Hospitality

[ YEAR ]

2025

[ Overview ]

Carpe Diem Tours is an award-winning tour operator running small group and private experiences across Rome, Barcelona, London, Lisbon, Budapest, Madrid, and Florence. Ghost tours, food tours, Vatican private access, underground catacombs, tipsy tours — a diverse catalogue of experiences built around one principle: that travellers deserve something better than a bus and an umbrella in the air. We came in to build the design system, the website, and the underlying digital infrastructure from the ground up. A component library that could hold together across seven cities and dozens of tour types. A booking experience that converted travellers comparing multiple options on mobile. A stationery suite that carried the standard into every physical touchpoint. And a performance-engineered build that handled real booking volume without buckling.

[ Client ]

Carpe Diem Tours

[ Website ]

Live Site

[ Project Goals ] Build a design system and digital platform that scales without breaking — across seven cities, dozens of tour types, multiple currencies, and an audience arriving from every market in the world.

A traveller landing on carpediemtours.com from a Google search has seen dozens of tour operator websites before this one. The platform needed to communicate trust and quality in the first seconds — and then make the path from interest to booking as frictionless as possible.

Underneath the experience: a design system rigorous enough that the internal team could extend it to new cities, new tour categories, and new marketing pages without the visual coherence of the platform degrading over time. Most design systems fail at this point — they're built for the launch and fall apart when the first addition is made without the original team.

Ours was built for what comes after the launch.

[ Project Scope ]

We delivered the complete design system and digital platform — from component architecture to production build.

Full UI component library — tour cards, city tiles, booking modules, navigation patterns, review display components, hero sections, and supporting page elements
Design token framework — typography scale, spacing system, colour architecture, interactive states
Wireframes and conversion flow mapping — homepage, city landing pages, tour category pages, individual tour pages, private tour pages, and booking flow
Custom web development — performant, SEO-ready, built to handle real booking volume
Core Web Vitals engineering from the build level — image delivery, font loading, script management
Business cards, letterheads, and brand collateral
Print-ready file delivery for all items
Social media design system — templates, post formats, story structures

[ Challenges ]

Most design systems are built for a known scope: the pages that exist at launch. The problem arrives when page two of a new city needs to be built in six months by a team member who wasn't part of the original build, using the design system without a designer in the room.

001
Build a design system that survives expansion
002
Design a platform that handles seven cities without losing the visitor
003
Display 12,000+ reviews as conversion tools, not decoration
004
Deliver a stationery system that extends the digital standard into physical touchpoints
005
Engineer performance for a platform with real booking volume

[ results ] A design system and digital platform that matched the quality of the experiences Carpe Diem Tours had built over years — and gave their team the infrastructure to keep building on it.

01
Design System
02
Multi-city platform
03
Conversion-focused booking experience
04
Performance build
05
Stationery suite

"Working with Create Circus on our design system was one of the best decisions we made. They didn't just deliver components — they built something our team could actually use and extend independently. Every time we've added a new city or a new tour type, the system has held together exactly as it should."