Travel Guide Cover Design Case Study: Insight Guides

Insight Guides Case Study for Travel Guide Covers

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.

Insight Destination Guides

Insight Guides: The top third of the Insight covers feature the brand logo in red and the destination name in blue, both centered on a white background. The destination image takes up the rest of the cover, and white text is used to make their call-out text stand out.

Take a look at DK Eyewitness City Guides and you’ll see they use the same approach—of a white block above the image, but they use a lighter font in their version.

Design Tip: Have you tried replacing your font with a different weight or style, to see if it impacts the overall look and feel of your cover? It’s more effective to use one font, and play around with different font weights, font sizes, and experiment with bold or italic versions.
Insights Guides
Insight Guides Destination Travel Guide Covers

The tag line text at the bottom of the cover features a standard trio of Stunning photographs, In-depth features on history and culture, and Detailed Maps.

There is a call-out about their free app placed on a transparent back background, which isn’t as visible, so it doesn’t compete with the adjacent text for prominence.

The book on the far right is part of their Pocket Guide Series. And for this they include the text under the destination so that it’s easy for readers to see it’s a different type of guide.

Frommer’s also use a red call out banner related to the digital app for this new series.


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

TravelGuide design tips using #InsightGuides as a case study for how to attract reader's attention for your #selfpublished travel guide. #indieauthor #travelblogger Click To Tweet

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.

How to Write a Travel Guide 4 book banner

Each month I host a monthly free prize draw and give away a travel writing e-book to the lucky winner. Sign up to join my mailing list to participate.

Author: Jay Artale

Focused on helping travel bloggers and writers achieve their self-publishing goals. Owner of Birds of a Feather Press. Travel Writer. Nonfiction Author. Project Manager Specialising in Content Marketing and Social Media Strategy.

6 thoughts on “Travel Guide Cover Design Case Study: Insight Guides

  1. This article is very Unique and informative. I would suggest you to update this beautiful piece of article to add more value to it. Nice work. Keep it up.

  2. Interesting article about the design of travel guides. places emphasis on the font selection, tagline placement, and genre balance. A great resource for artists!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

CommentLuv badge