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

Rough Guides Covers

Destination Guides

Rough guides have also had a recent redesign, and I’ve included three new covers and one using the older design. They have moved away from using the sky blue banner with their logo, name, destination and tagline: Expert Advice, Full Coverage, Easy to Use.

They’re still using their distinctive orange logo, and The Rough Guide To text, but they’ve replaced their old tag line with a circular badge, which is text around their logo, on the lower right, which uses the tagline: Make the Most of Your time on Earth. The addition of the badge helps to draw your eye down the images, and in all cases the focus is on the impactful destination photograph.

• Design Tip: Do you need to include a text element or logo to draw your reader’s eye down to the bottom of your cover?

Pocket Guides

Other books in the Rough Guide series have the orange logo in the same position, which ties all of their books together under a consistently branded umbrella.

For the Pocket series they’ve created a title block at the bottom of the book using the same background color as their logo.

Rough Guides has used a small text box in a highly contrasting color to indicate that there’s a map in the book. This turquoise box stands out against the highly visible orange. Opponent process theory suggests that the most contrasting color pairs are red–green and blue–yellow, but it’s the contrast of a cool blue-based tone against a warm red-based tone that creates the best contrast.

Read this Canva Article to learn more about designing with contrast.

• Design Tip: Have you based your color combinations on established color theory to get the best effect?

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.

Click for more Travel Guide Cover Design Articles

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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