Creating a Tourist Trail Map – Part 3, The design and visual persuasion

Your graphic design should use visual persuasion to attract the passer-by to your leaflet in the stand and again to attract them to look at it when they finally pick it up off the stand. You need to know what colours and fonts to use for which purpose, and what design to use to match to the people that you want to attract.

When designing your leaflet try to use a variety of visual and psychological devices. For our leaflet we wanted to get away from all the cliched traditional pictures of landscapes and items for sale – we wanted to associate the outdoors with the main subject of the leaflet, to add enthusiasm and fun, and to stand out from the crowd.

Yellow is a bright and happy colour, and any use of red tends to be eye-catching. So in order to be different and eye-catching we used a female walker in a red jacket on our cover which is predominantly yellow. And it’s already having an impact!

We took inspiration from the drawings in a book we found in a second hand shop, called ‘Songs of Near and Far Away’ illustrated and written by E Richardson, and printed in 1900. We used the graphical style but interpreted it in a contemporary way. The style is consistent with the period of the architecture. Here we tried not to over design or over finesse the art work. It’s horses for courses.

Once you have got it altogether for the printers – proof read, proof read and proof read again!

Next up – printing versus modern technology – the future of your advertising.

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Creating a Tourist Trail Map - Part 2, How to get started.

Your first question will most likely be ‘Do it all yourself?’ or ‘Do you get someone in to do some or all of it?’.

If you do most of the donkey work, i.e. speaking to the sponsors of your map to get their buy in, collecting their money and proof reading the final version then this will help keep the costs down. However always try to find someone with a track record in this sort of thing to help you out – at least with the graphic art, design, colouring, type setting and marketing style.

You also need to make sure you have enough money from your sponsors to cover the costs of professional printing, your graphic design and the distribution – if you are having it distributed. Take care, since in the UK, distribution costs attract VAT.

Some sponsors may pay for featured adverts and others will be happy with a ‘gazetteer’ entry.

You will need to decide on the type of distribution route – it’s a bit like a bus route. Ask your distributer about this. We used A-Ha as our distributer and they were very helpful.

In terms of printing you need to be careful about allowances for folding, colours and any trim and bleed issues of the colour. We used H&H Reeds for our printing, who were also very helpful. We were there for the final colour selection and the printing.

At this stage it is all about the planning and you may be surprised at how much time this eats up. Be prepared!

Next Up – The art work – Visual Persuasion

Creating a Tourist Trail Map – Part 1, Introduction

If you are a business owner or an individual and you want a tourist trail map for your town or area, what do you need to do? How do you ensure it will be a success and drive people to your area?

To whet your appetite here is a short (10 second) animation of the final print version of a tourist trail that we ourselves put together.

Just how do you overcome the challenges of getting a large group of people together to sponsor the project, how do you get the right graphics, how do you manage the costs? We will tackle all these in our short series of blogs.

Stay tuned.

www.sciarts.co.uk