Design
Having worked with Cereal in the past, we were able to jump right into the design with a clear understanding of their brand. To begin the design process: we reviewed and analyzed their past city guides; compared them to other existing ones; and noted how typically overwhelming a city guide can be. Pages are usually flooded with information, crammed to fill every inch of real estate. We believed this reality made Cereal’s guide unique, thanks to its simple and clean page layouts; therefore, we wanted the new design to retain these attributes. Cereal’s way of travel is meant to be relaxing and we wanted the guide to reflect this. However, unlike a magazine or coffee table book, the guidebook needed to be robust and useful on the road. With this in mind, we decided to keep the overall structure and feeling, but refine the layout and revisit some elements where improvements could be made.

The venues' intro spread [6] is one area where we spent quite a bit of time on as we found it to be the most important layout in the guidebook. In the previous guide, each venue would have a full title and text page dedicated to the address, phone number, and website. We felt this space could be better allocated to showcase more photos of the venues—providing more examples of the venues to the reader. To allow readers to have easy navigation, we placed the information consistently at the top left corner so it can be easily identified when flipping through the book. A double-page spread template was added for the flexibility of featuring landscape and/or portrait photos. We also considered page colour to provide clearer distinction between sections in the guide book. When the reader observes the edge of the book, they can see the distinction between white pages—representing venues and dark grey pages for the interviews and essays.