Travel Guide Cover Design Case Study

This is the first is a series of articles 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

Lonely Planet Travel Guide Cover Design

Nobody sells more travel guides than Lonely Planet. So when it comes to designing your travel guide cover, their covers should be the first ones you refer too for design inspiration. They have so many travel guides and other travel related books, they’ve created line-looks to differentiate their content, and this article includes examples of their primary lines.

Lonely Planet Cover Design Destination Guide

• As the #1 travel guide publisher, Lonely Planet goes for a minimalist cover design.
• The focus of the cover is absolutely destination image, and they look to be chosen for maximum impact. Nothing too fussy, just bold colors or views.

• They include their logo centered at the top, just above the Travel Guide title, and in where needed, they include additional destination details.
• They include a unobtrusive Features box located in the same place on each cover that calls out a couple of the generic content highlights: Easy to use Maps, New Look guide, Local Secrets, Best Planning Advice, which vary by cover. These blue boxes are a recent addition to Lonely Planet covers, and do a good job of pulling your eye down the full length of the cover.

Other Lonely Planet Guide Book Line-Looks

Here’s examples of travel guide cover designs for some of the primary line-looks developed by Lonely Planet.

Lonely Planet Cover Design Phrase Book Series

Look at how Lonely Planet have differentiated their Fast Talk phrase book from their Phrasebook & Dictionary series.

They’re still using a full-cover image and the standard positioning for their brand logo, but the Fast Talk books have a speech bubble incorporated as the primary title block.

Lonely Planet Cover Design Road Trip Series

Rather than focus on one cover image, these road trip books include a primary half-page photo, and two quarter-page photos, with the line brand title treatment in a central block.

• The primary photo is an iconic image of the road trip landscape.
• One images in each cover is a classic car (to give an immediate recognition factor of a road trip).
• The other image is a quirky, unfamiliar image to add personality and intrigue to the book’s contents.

The harmony of three on the cover is mirrored within the contents of this travel guide – each on in the series is split into three sections: Plan your trip, On the road, Road trip essentials.

Lonely Planet Cover Design Pocket Series

In the Pocket guide series, Lonely Planet are still using a full-cover image and the standard positioning for their brand logo, and have added a standard primary title block with the Pocket branding clearly visible in red against a white background. The use of red is a design grabs attention, and with everything else going on in these covers the font color is an important element to highlight for the reader.

How are Pocket guides different from Lonely Planet’s destination guides? Each book has a subtitle of Top Sights * Local Experiences, so it’s evident straight away that this is a more concise guide for the independent traveller. These smaller books are intended for short breaks and weekends and are concise, colourful and easy to use, getting you to the heart of a city with expert advice, neighborhood chapters, top sights, walking tours and day planners.

Lonely Planet Cover Design Discover Guide Series

These Discover series travel guides are shorter, more concise guidebooks compared to the country guide series. They focus on the top sights and most authentic experiences. Perfect if you don’t need accommodation recommendations, they’re packed with expert knowledge, local secrets and carefully crafted itineraries, as well as the most relevant and up-to-date advice. If purchasing this title outside of the Americas, this series is named “Best Of” instead of “Discover”. This series uses a tag line of Top Sights * Authentic Experiences.

They’re still using a full-cover image and the standard positioning for their brand logo, but the Discover books have a green primary title block with white text. The newer guides are also incorporate the publication year in the same green, on the upper right corner.

Lonely Planet Cover Design On a Shoestring Series

If you’ve read the origins of Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s Lonely Planet origins, you’ll know that these shoestring guides where the foundation of the brand.

Lonely Planet’s first book was Across Asia on the Cheap, and their second book was Southeast Asia on a Shoestring (often referred to as the yellow bible). The British Broadcasting Company owned the LP brand for a while, but In 2013 they sold it to NC2 Media for just nearly US$78 million. Not bad for a brand whose first book looked like this:

The two shoestring guides on the left show the old and new design layout of these covers. Lonely Planet have moved away from a busier cover in favor of a single vertical title block that includes a centered brand logo within the panel. They’re still using a Big Trips on Small Budgets tag line, but have moved away from a collection of additional smaller images and a Features box. The simplicity of these new designs is impactful and eye catching.

Travel Guide Cover Design Industry Comparisons

• Most travel guide publishers feature a single destination image, which extends to each edge of the cover, except for DK guides which has the main image placed within a white border.
• All Destination titles are White Text, except for DK guides which uses different title colors to complement the photo they’ve used.
• Lonely Planet and Rough guides use white text directly onto the background image, whereas Rick Steves and Fodors places this information within a colored box.
• All of the guides use text, badges or boxes to draw the readers eye down the full length of the cover, except for Rick Steves that just uses a single text box.

As you can see 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.

Read more articles in my How to Write a Travel Guide Series

I’m putting the finishing touches on my How to Write and Self-Publish a Travel Guide Series, which details a step by step approach for writing and producing your own travel guide. It’s part of a four-part series aimed at helping travel bloggers achieve passive income based on their passions and existing content.

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