Travel Guide Cover Design Case Study: Luster’s 500 Hidden Secrets series

Travel Guide Cover Design Case Study

This is a continuation of my article series where I review and assess the cover design elements used by the traditional and indie travel guide publishers. By reviewing how these publishing companies and indie authors combine images, fonts, color, and design elements into a cohesive design, you’ll get invaluable insight into the best approach for designing your travel guide cover.

The most important thing to remember is that your reader has specific expectations when it comes to buying a book within a niche, you only have to look at the primary book niches like romance, thriller, cozy mystery etc. to see how each niche has their own set of design styles that help to communicate the book’s content to their target audience, and travel guides are no different.

When you browse the Amazon bestsellers in your genre, you should notice patterns in color schemes, fonts, layouts, and images. You’ll want your cover to stand out by looking awesome, yet ensure it naturally fits into your genre. via Dave Chesson

In highlighted boxes below, like this, I’ve included a series of Design Tips, which are primarily questions and prompts you should consider in your design choices.

Luster’s 500 Hidden Secrets

Luster Travel Guides are only available in paperback, and their books are aimed at visitors who want to avoid the usual tourist spots and residents who are keen to track down the city’s best-kept secrets. Each guide is written by a local, and their author name is included on the cover. Each travel guide contains listings for a 100 different categories, each with 5 listings.

Luster’s Cover Design Destination Guide

Luster follows the niche trend of using a single image across the cover.

When I look at these four examples, the Bruges travel guide stands out. The other three use images of buildings, whereas Bruges features a generic nature-themed image (which could be anywhere in the world). This is an odd choice because this city has some amazing looking buildings, which would have made a more eye-catching cover and created a common thread across their travel guides.

Some travel guide publishers use branded images or logos to create that harmony, but Luster is only using their title block as the common thread.

Each travel guide features a simple title treatment using black sans serif text in a white box, which varies in located based on it’s optimal position within the featured image. The publisher name is included on one of the covers as white text directly on the featured image, but the primary branding element is “The 500 Hidden Secrets of…” located above the destination name.

Luster’s Content

The cover follows the design theme of a standard destination guide, but the content is a collection of listings with addresses and contact information and a summary of the listing. There’s nothing on the cover to suggest that this is how the content is presented. These books are different than standard destination guides, so there’s an opportunity to call out the book’s uniqueness with a branded icon.

500 Hidden Secrets example page — Example of how 500 Hidden Secrets content is presented

Luster’s Spine Design

Luster have used a plain and uncluttered spine design for their paperbacks. Take a look at their use of black vs. white font to make their text stand out against the block of background color. The Havana guide would have benefited from a darker font to make the text easier to read, and although this white font creates a consistent look and feel across the title, readability is more important.

These are quite substantially sized travel guides with lots of blank space available on the spines, so the destination name could be presented in a larger font to make it stand out on the shelf. In a sea of spines – readers need to clearly and instantly know what destination your book is about.

Design Tip: Is there an image element you could use across all your travel guide covers which would help to increase the strength and harmony of your books?
Design Tip: If you’re using a title block, do you want it to be in a consistent cover location, or are you willing to move it around to the best position on your featured image?
Design Tip: If there’s something that makes you’re travel guide unique, how can you succinctly convey that on your cover?

Travel Guide Cover Design Industry Comparisons

There are distinct niche norms for destination travel guides, although each traditional publisher has developed a branded look that readers can automatically identify with. Your role, as a cover designer, is to assess the industry norms, and create a cover that is representative of your content, your writing style, and the travel niche you want to feature in.