Travel Guide Cover Design Case Study: Moon Guides

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.

Moon Travel Guide Covers

Moon follows the trend of having their image extend across the entire cover, with their Moon branding in the upper left or right, and the destination name contained in a sky blue box outlined in white. This moves around the cover based on its optimal positioning so as not to obscure key elements of the cover image.

Moon Guides Travel Guide Cover Design Case Study How to Write and Self-publish a Travel Guide series by Jay Artale for Rough Guides Travel Bloggers and Writers — New style Moon Guide covers

Below the destination, Moon also includes the author’s name in white text overlaid on the cover image, and this is the only one of our examples where the author is highlighted on the front of the guide.

The older Moon covers use a destination image covering two-thirds of the cover, and the top third features the destination name in white text on a blue background. The old white logo on a black background was more distinctive, but this has been replaced with a less obtrusive logo similar to how Lonely Planet uses their logo.

Moon Travel Guide Road Trip Covers

As well as their standard destination travel guides, Moon publish a Road Trip series. They use their same Moon branding at the top of the book (but in this case it’s centered). The destination is contained within a art deco inspired content box, which includes the Road Trip text in yellow. The box and branding is positioned directly onto the background image, so in some cases the Road Trip text doesn’t stand out very well (as in the Pacific Coast Highway travel guide).

At the bottom of these Moon travel guides the authors names is contained within a yellow box with blue text, and additional details about the destination the guide covers, is contained within a blue box with white text. These really are readable unless you increase the size of cover image on your screen.

The colors (blue and yellow) are similar to the branded colors used in Rick Steves travel guide covers.

Design Tip: Is there enough space on your cover to increase the size of your author name to make it more readable?
Design Tip: If you’re including additional information on your cover to further define the scope of your destination, how readable should this text be?
Design Tip: If you’re including a branded logo or series name (e.g. Road Trip) and using a consistent color across all of your covers, is it the optimal color for all backgrounds, or would it be best to vary the text color to make it stand out?

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.