The 2023-24 edition of the Gloucester Massachusetts Visitor Guide was released this week, and started appearing in the wild all around Gloucester and Cape Ann. This is the fourth year we have designed and produced this annual guide for Discover Gloucester, the official destination marketing organization for the historic seaport city, just up the coast from our studio in Beverly. It’s one of our favorite and most visible annual projects and takes us back to our roots in both magazine design and travel & tourism marketing. This year’s guide includes a special 16-page section that we produced for Gloucester 400+ to celebrate Gloucester’s 400th anniversary, bringing the total page count up to 84-pages.
The Visitor Guide is produced over the course of about three months, and contains nearly a dozen features, as well as many pages of listings, maps, and an event calendar. It is also heavily supported by advertisements for locals shops, restaurants and tourist activities.
With all of these diverse elements, it’s a great fit with the studio’s strengths in editorial design, project management, and print production. Lots of moving parts. In addition to creating engaging editorial designs, we have to organize and structure the listing sections so that readers can easily access information. And while most of the advertisements are submitted by individual businesses, there is considerable project management and quality control that goes into managing submissions from dozens of sources, and assuring that all are produced up to the standards of the publication.
At the top of this post we showcase the covers of the past four editions. Below are a few features from this and previous years’ books. You can also see this year’s full book in flipbook form here. One of our favorite features this year, Sets and the City, highlights filming locations from some of the many movies and television shows that have been shot in Gloucester including Wicked Tuna, CODA and The Perfect Storm.
Travel & tourism content marketing has been one of our core strengths for some time. In the earlier days of his career, John was the Art Director of Continental, the inflight magazine for Continental Airlines, and designed travel features for destinations around the globe. If you are a destination marketing or travel & tourism organization and are looking for a design partner to produce your content marketing publication, please get in touch with us to discuss how we can help. We’d love expand this segment of our business.