Travel Guide Printing
If you’re part of the group responsible for tourism printing, printing visitor brochures, printing tourist maps, printing local area maps, printing travel trifolds, printing travel brochures, or otherwise creating the marketing collateral designed to get people to travel to and spend money somewhere specific, Print Farm has the expertise to ensure you do it right, and avoid common mistakes. In this series, we’ll share some of our experiences with similar projects and show you how Print Farm can help your tourism campaign printing or visitor campaign printing succeed and generate more return for less investment!
The first that comes to mind when we think of tourism printing or visitor printing is maps. There are two main types of maps – the ones that are roughly the size of a placemat, designed not to be folded until they’re in the end user’s hands, and show a town, a small region, or a city. These often are drawn by an artist rather than laid out by a cartographer – they’re not set up to show exact scale, they’re set up to draw attention to certain features at the cost of perfect accuracy.
These are quite popular with consumers, because they tend not to result in information overload. Consumers also love them because they can fold them the way they want, to show a specific area of interest, rather than struggling with them. These can be one color or full color, and are generally less expensive to design and print. This owes partially to the fact that they are generally printed flat, not glossy, and generally can be designed by mutual agreement on the points to be emphasized and with the work of any competent artist.
The advantage to flat tourism map printing is that they are easy to work with, fairly inexpensive, and provide a great deal of information without overloading the consumer with information on their printed visitor map. The disadvantage is that you can’t show everything you want to on your tourist map printing, and it’s important from a marketing perspective to choose carefully which places you use to draw the attention of a visitor. If properly designed, visitor map printing of this type can be quite effective by drawing people towards a main point of interest which requires them to pass or take notice of other points of interest which they will also want to see.
Rather than showing every last detail and attraction on tourism map printing of this type, proper design gives you the ability to actually choose the route that your visitor will take between points of interest by choosing your focal points which are indicated on the map and choosing the roads which are indicated on the map. Maybe you need to print visitor maps for a small town, and you find that attracting visitors who will drive all the way down your small main street isn’t appropriate because of the traffic problems it would cause. An alternative to this is to print flat visitor maps which emphasize points of interest as well as alternative routes and parking. This can help with the inflow of visitors from your printed tourist maps and ensure that you draw visitors while maintaining the integrity of your town or region since this is, after all, what attracts people there in the first place.
A second type of visitor maps printing is the highway road maps that everyone cordially despises, though they are sometimes necessary. Visitor map printing can use this style if it’s necessary to accurately depict roads and routes over a large area, but printed tourism maps should avoid this style unless the region being shown is large enough to warrant it. In the case of, for example, a state-wide highway map, this style would be appropriate and even expected. Printing folded highway maps for visitors is a great idea if you’re dealing with a large enough area that people expect exact distances and routes rather than simply indicating points of interest. Points of interest can be shown on folded visitor map printing, but they generally are less prominent on the map and refer to a key indicating the point of interest on the road map printing, requiring the end user to refer back to the key and take their eyes off the map itself. When appropriate, folded visitor map printing can be quite effective to draw visitors and ensure that people get where they want to go while not passing by the points of interest you want them to take note of. It’s important to choose folded visitor map printing vs flat visitor map printing and folded tourism map printing vs flat tourism map printing for the correct reasons. Print Farm has extensive experience in this sort of work and can consult with you, even providing graphic design services, to ensure that your visitor map printing or tourism map printing campaign is successful beyond your expectations! Continue through the series to see what other types of tourism printing and visitor printing Print Farm can help you leverage to ensure the success of your campaign!
Printing company consulting is important for visitor map printing campaigns and tourism map campaign printing. Make sure you work with a printing firm which has extensive experience in this sort of work. As a parting piece of advice in this installment in the series, please make sure to consider carefully how large your visitor map printing needs to be, to ensure that it remains accessible to your target audience – impatience is a standard consumer function, and you need to remember that your visitor map printing has to be easy to use. If your tourism map printing is too large and requires too much folding and unfolding to find the information the visitor wants, they will not use it. If it takes more than three folding or unfolding actions to reach the information they’re looking for, your visitor will either drive right on past, or give up and go to a mobile internet search. At that point, either way, you’ve lost their attention and you’ve lost the ability to direct and encourage them towards the points of interest on the visitor map printing that you want them to see, defeating the entire purpose. Contact Print Farm today to see how we can help your tourism map printing campaign!
