pirates and scalpels · 2009-01-18 12:02

Yesterday was the inaugural papercamp in London, alongside its big sister bookcamp. I presented a half bookish half paperish presentation about travel guides.

What I forgot to mention or make explicit: how there are totally different stages and needs for guide books – especially pre-booking, pre-travel, during travel, during holiday.

So here is, from memory, what I talked about, with a few additions:

My name is Chris and I have an obsession with guide books.

Last year I went to Japan, and here are most of the guidebooks I bought, and read, before I went.

This is Venice for Pleasure, pretty much the ur-guidebook for the last 50 years. It’s set out as 6 day long walks, with rudimentary maps. It’s just extremely passionate and personal about Venice.

There are many new guidebooks. Wallpaper publish these small city guides. I like that they’re smaller – carefully picked for people who live a Tyler Brulee lifestyle.

This is as close to a map as the Wallpaper guides get. Why do you need a map if you’re taking a taxi? However, I do like that they colour code interesting areas of the city – and actually, maybe that’s all you need, rather than individual shop or restaurant recommendations. Just interesting streets to investigate.

This is the Le Cool guide to Barcelona. It’s an offshoot of a weekly/monthly free events newspaper.

There’s lots of good recommendations, and it’s passionate, but it’s trying far too hard. Every double page spread is designed differently, and this is as close to a map as you’ll get. So not so useful when you’re actually in the city.

This is a Japanese guidebook for Hiroshima. It’s not special – there were hundreds of similar ones. But it’s very differently designed to Western guidebooks. (I’m assuming – I can’t read the text). They also have lots of mooks – magazine books. It’s a different attitude to magazines: old ones don’t disappear from the shelves, just that new ones are added.

This is a spread about the temple in Miyajima. It uses photography to really show what it’s like to be there – almost virtual reality. Maps are shown as needed, at the scale and left of information you’ll need. It’s almost just-in-time information.

This is the hotel information in the book. Far more austere, focussed on the information. There’s a supporting telephone and mobile phone service, along with QR codes for each hotel. Really nice physical/digital integration.

And there’s a level of detail and illustration about things like food that you never get in Western guideboooks. Notice that in this book, each double page spread is designed differently too, but it’s always to support the presentation of the information.

They’ll even help you choose the right manju.

Even the bigger guides are realising the need for smaller, more up to date guidebooks. They’re also showing when they were made – before you used to have to scrabble around in the small print to work out when it was published. This Time Out 2009 guide boasts “Travel guides you can trust”, somewhat invalidated in that it was still 2008. Old habits die hard.

IDEO, bless ‘em, have entered the space too. This is the New York Eyes Open guide. The outside is the only map in the book – no index, and completely untransportable.

What I do like is that it’s extremely curated – it’s a really good list of places in New York. I think it’s important that guides have a point of view, whether it’s the uber-touristy Fodor’s or the jetset-design-lifestyle of Wallpaper. (I’ll just add that I thought of all companies, IDEO would have got the digital integration right – unfortunately, the supporting website seems like an ok idea that wasn’t looked after).

I’m nasty to my books. I rarely see the need to take and keep the entire guide.

Pretty much every book I own is dog-eared.

Guidebooks like this huge one to Spain get dissected. I’m often only going to 30 pages of the book.

It’s really important for maps to be the size of your hand. So I’m always cutting and refolding maps to bend to where I’m going to be, then re-folded or cut for the next place.

I really like the superfuture maps. Their website is from another world – the forums are full of people talking rather a lot about denim – but the maps are great, densely packed with good information, and when printed out are a really nice size.

When I was in New York recently, this was the best scale map I could create. Unfortunately it’s in Google Earth, so has all the real-world cruft you don’t care about in a map. I just want the streets, landmarks, and the places I want to go.

More normally, maps just become pieces of paper to write on needed information – addresses, public transport, opening times.

So, margins are important for all this information. If the map is at a necessary information density to be handable and useful there really isn’t enough room in the map to write what you need (even place names). This map came from the Doring Kindersley online guidebooks, where you can create your own travel guide. The mapping in the Venice one is extremely good.

They let you drag and drop the places you want from their list of articles, which is great in theory, but it’s quite restrictive, and if you knew the good places, you wouldn’t be buying the guidebook. You can buy a PDF for £2.50, which is often worth it just for the maps, or a printed guide for a tenner, which seems less good value.

Moleskine, purveyors of notebooks to the design classes, have created these ‘guidebooks’. In reality, there’s about 30 pages, of maps, an index, and well, thats about it. For Paris, I created a Google map with a lot of places on that I carefully transcribed into the book. It was useful, as you’re not That Tourist With the Map Blowing Away (instead, as Max said, you’re that bloke with the stupid design notebook).

It’s nice that there’s space for, say remembering which baguette to buy, but it’s not greatly useful. In fact, I wish they made a version with just the 30 pages of maps.

Aaron drew this map of a place in Barcelona in my Paris guide. I’m really not sure what to do with that.

These are the maps I create daily. They’re pirate maps – simple maps that have just the information I need to get somewhere. I’ve learnt that what’s most important for me are roads and roadnames. Often I’ll be using these with google maps on my phone – matching the flashing blue dot and roads with the map. Actually – I’m very forgetful, and I’ll leave them in the hotel. Luckily, as I’ve said before, the learning is in the making.

Many of the new guides have “interaction” – Moleskines ship with tracing paper (which, as was pointed out, may be useful for pirate maps), and lots of stickers, that I didn’t even remember, as I threw them out immediately.

It’s all pretend interaction though – these stickers in the IDEO books are really pretty useless…

I’m never sure what to do with business cards…

This is more normal. I mean, you get the business card after you’ve got to the place. I’m sure there’s lots that could be done to improve the physical/digital relationships, and getting information just in time, but I’ve not seen anything useful yet (it’s probably in Japanese).

Aaron has been experimenting with printing maps from various Internet information sources. They’re nearly there – but A4 is too small. A2 is a nice size when folded, A0… too big. Most people don’t have A2 printers, but there is an extensive network of print shops that could print them, or maybe we re-organise the folding to work with a3.

There is the Turkish map fold – and other similar patented folds, but like Aaron, I don’t think they’re the answer. I have this Manhattan map (and if any city suits this format of 2 Turkish maps it’s Manhattan – long and thin), but it’s too much of an action or reveal to use, and you never have the flatness or handibility you want in a map.

So, that’s it. After seeing Russell and Ben’s paper, I’m really thinking that that format might be right for a guidebook. What if guidebooks were more like newspapers? Designed to be ripped, folded, used once and thrown away. So, I’m prototyping it to see how it could work – could the outside sheet be all the pre-travel information you need, and could be left behind? The centre spread could be a nice a2-ish map. And other sheets could be divided into areas and specific place tear-offs. A one-shot travel guide.

I’d like one-shot novels as well. Wouldn’t it be nicer if the tube was littered with single interesting pages of novels rather than discarded London Lites?

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