My Project is two travel guides that I have put together from my experiences, and as something I would have loved to have had access to whilst planning my own travels.
Guide One: Washington DC in a Day
Guide Two: New York City in Four Days
Exegesis
The work I have produced is two travel guides, aimed at making travelling to these destinations as easy as possible. I chose to produce guides for two places I recently visited; New York City and Washington, DC, as I found it was very hard to figure out how to do everything I wanted to do in the small amounts of time I had there. I spent hours reading physical books, online blogs and just about every travel resource under the sun, and I felt there was a real gap in the market for a travel guide that is easy to understand, and takes the traveller step by step through every day of their travels. I chose to only produce guides for two cities, as I really wanted to focus on making sure I did them right and produced guides that were true of the cities. My main focus was on ensuring that my guides were simple, and easy to throw in a bag for people to take on the go with them, or to have on their phone.
My idea was to have a guide that was practical and gave travellers the option to fit in as much in their holiday as possible. I took inspiration from the many travel guides that I read from various companies and how they were too big and bulky or how they didn’t often give an actual itinerary idea for their travellers to follow. ‘In producing a tailored document, information should be coherent and relevant to the user’ (Wilkinson et al., 2000), this is something I kept in mind when producing my guides, using this as a guideline for the practicality of my guides. Making sure my guides were practical, informational and provided inspiration for travellers was my main concern. For these reasons, I decided to produce my guide in pamphlet form, as something that could be used digitally, or used physically if printed. The idea behind this was that it wasn’t an overload of information, but enough to give the traveller an itinerary and any other key information. I also chose to include a map in the Washington, DC guide as I felt it made it easier for people to navigate the area and understand how close everything is together within DC. Ideally I would love to have had this in video form as well for people to be able to watch the guides in action, but practically, I simply didn’t have the time or funds for another trip back to the USA, no matter how much I would have loved that.
There are a lot of travel guides, websites, blogs, vlogs and books out there, which led to me asking why mine was going to be different. Wilkinson et al. (2000), mentioned the idea of creating a user profile and tailoring the way the information is presented towards the user, in this case my aim was to have my guides available via multiple platforms (print, online, possibly in app form etc.) so that they would be suitable for different kinds of people. The way I delivered my guide, as a PDF, means that it is printable, is able to be sent as an email attachment and is even able to be saved to the documents section of a smartphone. In terms of making it stand out amongst others, I feel as if the simplicity and straight forward approach would make it stand out against the 200-page long guides that are available in stores, because as much as they are a wealth of information, they are impractical to carry and contain a lot of information to analyse. ‘With the rapid growth of internet, various online communication and sharing services have emerged as major communication channels for different kinds of users for different purposes’ (Sheng, 2014), this is also something that heavily influenced my thought process when creating my travel guides and I very much thought about how I could get the right amount of information to the right people in the right way.
This project was something that I really enjoyed completing, but I am aware that it is not perfect. I feel as if the information and the actual itineraries are something I’m very proud of, but overall I could have spent longer on the design and look. The main reason for me not doing this is that I am not completely comfortable in my own design abilities, and this is something that I would perhaps ask someone to help me with, or if it was something I was doing as a job, I would hire someone to help me with the design work. I believe that the form in which I have presented it (PDF) is useful as it can be used in many formats, I would love to be able to present it in video form as well one day, as I think it would be amazing for people to be able to see the adventures they will be undertaking. I think that my guide does separate itself from other guides available, and if I had have had something like this available to me, I would have found it extremely helpful! My main aim was to have something very straight forward and easy to follow, and I think I have achieved that.
Over all, I think that my guides are very useful and practical and could be useful for travel agents, or perhaps with other side by side in an online resource portal. I am extremely passionate about travel and I believe creating these guides has helped me to strengthen my writing skills and push my creative skills beyond their normal boundaries. Resources like these could be useful for travel agents and tourism bureaus, as well as travellers wanting to know more about their destinations without having to do all of the hard research.
References
Sheng, J. (2014). The Evolution of Research on Multimedia Travel Guide Search and Recommender Systems. Multimedia Modeling: 20Th Anniversary International Conference.
Wilkinson, R., Lu, S., Paradis, F., Paris, C., Wan, S., & Wu, M. (2000). Generating Personal Travel Guides from Discourse Plans. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 1892.
Kayla's Creativity Project 