University project: A guide to wild adventures

The aim of this project was to design a new 'guide to...' series that will inspire readers to go to new locations. Over the first lockdown I went on my first wild swimming adventure and spent the summer exploring new places to do open water swimming. Therefore I chose to based this series off those adventures. The series is for wild adventures that can be enjoyed by all ages and abilities. The initial series includes wild swimming, wild camping and coasteering. Each book can be used on its own but also work well as a collective series.

I enjoyed the whole design process of making this series a lot. We were given the opportunity to pitch our book series to employees at DK which was very exciting, especially as I would love to work for them in the future. I found their insights and advice extremely useful in designing a fun and exciting guidebook. 

When I first start a new project I always create a moodboard to help inspire and visualise the style I think would be most appropriate for the topic. To create this I researched existing guidebook designs that included maps and other visual elements. 

Throughout my design process I create a variety of sketches to help me visualise different approaches. These examples have been taken throughout the process and include user persona journeys, initial wire-framing for different pages, illustration sketches and book cover sketches. 

Creating a page structure for the entire book ensured that I could fit all the necessary content in, as well as helping me to plan, especially when it came to production. 

The spreads above show different variations of design for the more locations pages. I was experimenting with only using illustrations for the books but I decided that a mix of illustration and photography would be better, especially when dealing with locations because readers can visualise where they are going more easily. Although I had a lot of fun creating these illustrations, I think a mix is more appropriate. 

Here I have used a mock-up to show what the series would look like on a shelf next to other guidebooks. I also created mock-ups for the other books in the series because I was not able to craft all three.

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