Travel Guide Cover Design Case Study

This is the second 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

Rick Steves Travel Guide Cover Design

I’ve seen Rick speak at various travel events in California, and he’s a knowledgable and approachable guy. He’s carved out a niche for himself to become America’s most respected authority on European travel. He produces more than 50 guidebooks, is America’s most popular travel series on public television, and he hosts a weekly hour-long national public radio show, a weekly syndicated column, and free travel information available through his travel center and ricksteves.com.

In this video, Rick gives us a peek at what it takes to update his guidebooks.

Rick Steves Destination Guides

Rick Steves has opted for a tidy cover with his Rick Steves brand logo, travel guide location, and publication year prominently displayed on the cover, in a three-colored box with an white outline. This title information moves around the cover depending on where the placement is best, depending on the image he’s using.

The cover image spans the entire cover to the edges, and there’s no tag line, or content highlights called out.

Rick Steves Best Of Guides

Rick uses consistent brand colors across all his travel guide line-looks. His new Best Of series features two blocks of images. the primary image at the bottom with an iconic destination image, and a block of three square images with indicative images.

The emphasis in the title block is a clean look, leveraging his branded logo, the series name, and the destination. When I see yellow and blue like this I automatically think of Sweden and Ikea. The furniture giant prides itself on simplicity, and this cover title block reflects the sample simplicity.

In this video Rick Steves shows us the difference between his designation guides and his Best Of series.

Rick Steves Snapshot Guides

Rick’s Snapshot guides are an excerpted chapters from our full-length guidebooks. The cover version on the left is their old style design, and the three covers on the right are the new design. Just goes to show how a few tweaks to a cover design can create a dramatically different look and feel. These newer designs make the older design seem dated and staid.

These new covers leverage a bigger images, but the broad banners top and bottom are a prominent portion of the design. Rather than adjust the size on the turquoise blue destination block to accommodate different text lengths, the are going with a consistent block size which means there’s a lot of blank space on the cover when the title is smaller. Maybe this cover real estate could be better spent on displaying more of the photo, but when these covers are displayed in thumbnail size the destinations are still highly visible.

Rick Steves Pocket Guides

Pocket guides are aimed at people taking a short trip, or perhaps a return trip to a destination. It’s smaller than the complete guidebook (and in full color), but still offers our best sightseeing advice, a handful of self-guided city walks and museum tours, and a foldout map.

I’m sure it was an intentional design decision to make the trim size of these guides shorter, which immediately makes them seem more concise and compact. It’s these subliminal messages that help reader asses your book’s content from the clues you provide (the branded Pocket name, and the smaller size).

Addendum

Rick’s son, Andy, has also written a travel guide, and currently just the one, but I’m adding it to this Steves’ family collection for reference.

Developing a Branded look

Check out Rick Steves’ Logo Download page to see how he’s instructed his branded logo and title treatments should appear. He’s a stickler for consistency, and if you’re planning of writing and publishing multiple travel guides, you’ll need to develop a style guide for your brand design and colors. Not just for use on your covers, but across your entire brand.

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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