Marketing Training: Graphic Design & Heritage

How we trained a group of Travel & Tourism Students, helping them understand graphic design and then letting them create a new heritage tour for their home town. Work included planning out a new leaflet for Boston, Lincolnshire.

Text and photos by our heritage marketing expert, Angela Montague, who created and delivered the training sessions.

This case study is mostly visual, comprising a set of photos from my workshops with a brilliant group of Travel & Tourism students at Boston College. Topics covered: marketing, graphic design, photography & heritage tourism.

The first workshop introduced and defined graphic design, explaining how it is basically everywhere. From the obvious stuff, like posters and packaging, to the less obvious stuff, like every official road sign you see, and even those text-heavy leaflets you get with medicine.

Thanks to some excellent graphic design, people can understand road signs really quickly (look up: Margaret Calvert) and understand how their medicine works. It's much more than selling products!

We then moved on to looking at how graphic design is used in heritage tourism, with lots of excellent (and awful) examples up for discussion. This session ended up with hands-on 'war room' activity, with a map of Boston and a range of historic sites to place on the map to see what would make the best walking tour. Which sites were they going to leave out?

All the students left the session after picking a site they would research for the tour leaflet, in time for the next workshop.

Students plotting a map with potential locations, with a little help from a giant map, Boston Top Trump Cards and tutor Sarah Colbert on the right.

Laabiyah & Katherine from Heritage Lincolnshire bring their heritage knowledge to the table in deciding which buildings to include.

Students with their selected sites for more research in preparation for workshop two.

In the second workshop, students got to grips with the mechanics of a heritage leaflet. Where should the map go? Where to put your funder logos? How to promote the town as a wider destination? What about car parks, toilets, bus routes?

They came up with a range of headlines for the crucial top spot on a leaflet's front page (often all you can see on the display rack) then started drafting out the layout in full.

Clever use of Snapchat here to test initial ideas before putting pencil to paper.

Using smartphones to play around with initial copywriting ideas was definitely second nature to the students (aged 16-18).

This student focused on the appeal of the 'dark paths of history'. This is always a heritage crowd-pleaser, people love a bit of Horrible History.

Another student bullet-points the appeal of a free family activity that's dog friendly with secrets revealed - a strong heritage tourism combination! And the subheading "come along with loved ones to update your knowledge with a side of coffee" sums up so much heritage marketing, doesn't it?

Then the workshop moved to decide how the tour's building information would sit alongside the map, with placeholder photos and Lorem Ipsum dummy text, as at this stage in graphic design it's all about the layout - final copy and photos often come later.

It was fantastic to see how each student brought their own ideas on how to layout the leaflet. These were combined into the final result...

Comment from Katherine at Heritage Lincolnshire, just after the launch of the trail and leaflet:

"Just to let you know Saturday went great and the trail was very well received, we even had some children complete the spotters trail on the day! I am currently distributing the leaflets to as many venues in Boston as I can. Also Sarah and her students absolutely loved the trail, she said they couldn't believe how good it looked!"

Artwork of the eight page heritage tour leaflet is below (click to enlarge).

Copywriting by Angela Montague (Push Creativity), photography Ashley Taylor (Push Creativity) graphic design by Susan Unsworth (Archaeological Project Services)

WHAT I LOVED ABOUT THIS TRAINING SESSION

It was delightful to see how quickly the students "understood the assignment" and made use of tools that were very familiar to them (smartphone apps), alongside more traditional maps, pencils and paper, to start to shape a new tour leaflet for the historic town of Boston. They were enthusiastic and keen to learn.

I wish them well in their chosen careers.

FIND OUT MORE

If you want to find out more about our approach to sharing our marketing knowledge through training:

Drop us a quick message with our contact form (it's quick and easy) or

Get in touch with the project lead for this training session Angela Montague on Linkedin.

With thanks to the fantastic students, tutor Sarah Colbert, Heritage Lincolnshire organisers Laabiyah Iqbal and Katherine Briggs, plus supporting organisations Boston Townscape Heritage Project, National Lottery Heritage Fund, Boston College, Boston Borough Council, Boston Big Local, and Lincolnshire Community and Volunteer Services.

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