The problem with the current offer of travel guides, is that they are mass-produced. In order to address a large targetgroup, a lot of potentially useful information is combined into the guides, making only small parts of the content truely useful for the individual. To solve this problem, I came up with 'last guides' as a graduation project: personalized travel guides with content that is automatically generated, and based on one's personal preferences and interests. This way, someone could for example choose to only have touristic sights and restaurants in his guide, while another person could indicate that he is particularly interested in old mansions, but not at all in churches and cathedrals. When the user has made their specific choices on the website of last guides, he can then either choose to order an e-book, or to have a printed and bound version sent to their home or hotel.
The guides consist of three main sections. The first section is 'background', where stuff like the history, the environment, the inhabitants and the culture of a country are discussed. This can be either very briefly in the form of simple lists, to very extensive with long essays about different subjects. The second section are the 'tours': composed routes along various similar highlights, based on one's personal interest, such as 'street art', 'old mansions' or 'waterfalls'. The last part of the guide are the 'highlights', where common practicalities are summed up, either by instance or by area. Also here the user can choose for themselves how extensive he wants the amount of information per subject.
The layout of the guides is also quite different from usual, since these guides are truely 'pocket size' (91 x 125 mm), without compromizing on the content. All the text in the guides is rotated ninety degrees to make it easier to read on such small sizes, while the headers stay in their 'normal' position to keep the easiness of scrolling through pages. The page itself has a strict modular grid, offering several main possibilities of filling it with text and images. The two main versions consists of either small blocks of text with small and medium sized images, and a single column of large text with large images.
I have paid special attention to cartography, which has been one of my life-long passions. Along my graduation, I followed an extra course in cartography at Utrecht University. With the gained knowledge and skills, I managed to create several maps for the travel guides that go well together with the content and layout. Besides the simple black-and-white maps through the guides, several foldout maps are added at the end of each guide, making it possible to work on a bigger size than the small spreads of the rest of the guide.
In order to communicate my concept, and the amount of influence a user has on the content and layout of their guides, I manually created four different guides on the same area (Bergen, Norway), as if they were ordered by four different stereotype travellers: the tourist, the adventurer, the backpacker and the specs. While it may not be very clear from the various images shown here, the guides are in fact very different from each other. The smallest guide (from the tourist) is with 32 pages almost uncomparable with the biggest guides (from the specs and the adventurers) with 112 pages. Of course, these guides are handmade, but theoretically they should be automatically generated. Therefore, this is merely a research into the possibilities of such a project.
The four different last guides.
Examples of spreads from the tourist's guide.
Examples of spreads from the backpacker's guide.
Examples of spreads from the adventurer's guide.
Examples of spreads from the specs' guide.
A couple of the maps I created.
The layout of the graduation exhibition in Breda.
