Photography Courtesy of Lonely Planet
A simple, functional guidebook to help travellers quickly plan a day out in the city.
While I was finishing-up my honours degree at the end of 2014 I was invited to assist art director Mark Adams on prototyping early development work for Lonely Planet's newest guidebook series. After endless iterations, focus groups around the world, prototype after prototype, and a little more design development, we got a new and innovative print guidebook out the door. Post design-development I templated the internal design in one of the most confusing printer templates I've worked with; navigating tight space constraints, complex dielines, comprehensive transport tools, images and copy. The end result is a comprehensive yet incredibly simple tool that helps travellers plan on the run and gives every little bit of information you could hope for when naviagting a foreign city.
Lonely Planet's new Make My Day series lets you mix and match to make your own perfect day. Use the unique spiral-bound flipbook to build your own itinerary for morning, afternoon and evening. Expert tips and advice get you to the heart of the city's must-see sights and experiences, and the maps and transport planner help you to get your bearings and navigate between sights. Build your own day from more than 2000 combinations!
The launch titles included Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, New York City, Paris, Rome, San Fransisco, Sydney, Tokyo & Washington D.C.
Project Lead/Content Director: Sasha Baskett
Art Direction: Mark Adams
Travel Planner The product development team worked tirelessly to solve the travel planner function of the book. Led by Sasha Baskett we finally figured out – after uncountable trial and error tests – how to make the 2,000 unique combinations. All have details on how to get from your morning activity to your afternoon one, and onwards to your evening one; all on the same small card. From a short walk to an hour subway ride, you know what sights you can group together by how close they are to each other.
Image Style Brief With a restricted internal page size it was essential to make the images pop as much as possible. We created a style brief outlining photos that drew the reader into the image using wide-angle photography. Where possible the images throughout the book act as on-the-ground photos that show travellers exactly what they can expect.
The perks of doing the image research for a number of the series' covers is that I got a shot of mine in Hong Kong into the shortlist for circulation throughout the company. And it was chosen to be one of the three cover photos for the guide!
Marketing Materials Beyond work on the product I helped the sales & marketing department prepare a number of items for bookfairs and booksellers to promote the unique aspects of the book and get Make My Day into the market place. During the early development stages we put together a brochure taking users through the book, demonstrating how it worked and how it stood out from what is currently on offer in the marketplace.
It was an increidble experience to see a product through from conception to reality while also being involved in the front-end consumer side of the business to pitch the concept to both booksellers and readers.
