Following a competitive tender process we were delighted to be awarded the opportunity to work with Waterford City & County Council to design the 2021 iteration of ‘WALK WATERFORD – From Sea to Mountains’, a tourism guide book aimed at attracting walkers and outdoor enthusiasts to Waterford.
We have worked with WCCC on an earlier iteration of the same name in 2012 and again in 2019, where we created a suite of 4 tourism guides based on a compact folded ‘Map’ style design with matching protective slip wallets. In 2021 we designed a book version that expanded the original concept with more information for the outdoor enthusiast.
The most recent 2023 version is a comprehensive collection of walks and trails, rural and urban, with interesting back stories and facts, detailed maps, and fantastic imagery throughout of the entire county.
Our most challenging task with the book design was to take a considerable amount of mixed content and structure it so that it has continuity of style, is representative of the Walk Waterford brand, is not congested and remains legible to the reader.
Allowing enough ‘white space’ around the content helped with giving it room to breath, while structuring the layout so that maps, wherever possible, had their own page with the written content alongside on another.
Chapter headers would be double page spreads with a fantastic image representing the title and also act as a method of resting the readers eye.
In terms of graphic design we designed a suite of icons to be used for the metrics, with colour keys to match the trails on the maps. The final output is a perfect bound book with a companion version designed for display online.
If you like walks and trails, be they in a city, deep in the countryside or up on the mountains, Waterford has something for the outdoor enthusiast of all levels. And if you can’t visit the county you can view and/or download the web version of the Walk Waterford – From Sea to Mountains guide book on the visitwaterford.com website here.