A relavant start for research is looking into design in cities but how its communicated through guides. I chose to look into city guides that are heavily influenced by design and culture itself, so not your average city guide. I considered the production and how the cities are represented for a different target audience.
The first guide is Node Berlin Oslo's 38 hour city guide series that works closely with journalists, bloggers and photographers from featured cities, in order to present a local’s perspective. The purely typographic covers link to the respective city, to reflect the unique characteristics of each location. The decision to focus solely on type to represent each location was due to Node’s instinct to create something new, a city is often represented by an iconic cliched image. This varies from block typefaces to represent London, a serif to portray the historical class of Vienna, to a more a relaxed written typeface describing Los Angeles.
The Amsterdam issue explores an artist studio in a church, a hidden bar in a burger joint, hippie beaches in the centre, a restaurant in a greenhouse and thrilling views from the old docks. So this guide introduces Amsterdam on a more personal level with the local creative community showcasing the city in a brief guide. The book is small in page size, with a perfect bound spine and glossed cover retailing at £9 so the production rate is high which makes the book more affordable. I believe the target audience is anyone interested in a more cultural trip to Amsterdam, eager to find the things which make each city unique, the sights, smells, sounds and tastes. With many city guides they state the obvious, and make each tourists trip a replica of everyone else's but I believe this guide leaves it to the reader by giving a brief introduction to each city. With this piece of research I was more concerned how a design city such as Amsterdam was presented to a particular audience.
'When we think of Berlin' was the second guide I researched into, the title of of the book prompts the same question I asked my peers when they think of Amsterdam. The guide shows markets, beer gardens, beautiful parks, wonderful bread, elegant stationery, intoxicating drinks and excellent coffee, as well as Korean fast food chicken and Germany's, as well as the world’s, only Ramones museum. It is an unlikely mixture executed in a posterzine which is litho printed onto recycled paper, which would have had a small production cost which makes it cheap enough for anyone including students possibly visiting the city.
The next guide was Monocle's city guides. Monocle was launched as a magazine briefing on global affairs, business, culture, design and much more. Which believes there is a global minded audience of readers who are hungry for opportunities and experiences beyond their national borders therefore the city guides channel the same target audience of people who are looking beyond the everyday. The travel guide series cuts through the hype and offers a real experiences, each book has 148 pages printed on paper stock with a hard cover retailing at £10, affordable and durable due to the hard cover.
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