The Town of Burin, Newfoundland and Labrador underwent a significant revitalisation of their Courthouse Park and Heritage Square and needed six tourist story boards to install in these areas. 

The client provided several problems I needed to solve. They felt most story boards are: 

1. too text heavy; 

2. too cramped; 

3. not entertaining. 

It was my job to research the history of this area, write the content, find appropriate historical visuals, and design the boards. I was to keep the text light, whimsical, and historical and centred around a visual-prioritised design with lots of white space.

One challenge I faced centred around the visuals that I had access to. Almost all of them were very old, low quality, and discoloured. I found these in provincial archives, from the Town of Burin, and from people I solicited on social media.

All of the images required extensive restoration and and colour correction.

Another major problem I hit was that there was simply too much historical information available. This was truly an exercise in concision and selective inclusion. 

Keeping in mind the client's need for limited text, I had to choose only the most critical and/or interesting pieces of information. 

Funny enough, this was particularly challenging when I unearthed a myriad of stories surrounding court cases that took place in Burin's historical courthouse.

As just one example of a source I referenced, the book below contained 17 densely written pages of interesting court cases heard in the Burin courthouse. 

From this book alone, I easily could've fill six storyboards of just these tales! But I was confined to only the one above.

The first three boards above focus on the Burin courthouse and other historical buildings while the three below focus on the tsunami of 1929 and the importance of coastal life to this region.

While not a constraint given to me by the client, I used this opportunity to exercise a cohesive design system. I used the same fonts and weights and sizes across all the boards. Same style of drop shadow on the images. Same tone, same style. The only variation came from the textured background: I chose a wood theme for the historical structures boards and a fish theme for the ocean-centred boards. 

As with the courthouse, my research about Burin's tsunami revealed reams and reams of stories. 

It my design philosophy that the best designs tell a story, and here I was faced with far too much content to include it all! A good problem to have in some senses—but a problem nonetheless.

The six story boards are now installed in the Courthouse Park and Heritage Square areas in the Town of Burin. The photos below show their orientation.