InDesigner: Two-Wheeled Design

Skip this article. I mean it. If you don’t, you may find your next paycheck headed straight for Trek Travel. A subsidiary of the Trek Bicycle company, Trek Travel’s motto is “Cycling Vacations of a lifetime.” One look at their printed material and you’ll see what they mean. Every photo is so full of beautiful views, you’ll want to crawl into the pages. The picturesque destinations include Tuscany, New Zealand, and Costa Rica. Tricia Burke, Trek Travel brand and creative manager, is the designer who creates the company’s print materials. She says her inspiration comes from the “phenomenal destinations and the beautiful photographs of them. The goal of the design is to pull the viewer into the destination.”

Catalogs are updated each year. “The brand identity remains consistent,” Burke says, “and there are obvious similarities from year to year. I change the design of the introductory pages and the destination layouts each year to keep things fresh without sacrificing the brand recognition that we’ve worked to create.”

Burke also designed a mouth-watering calendar that customers received as a gift.

Besides a bicycle pump, InDesign is Trek Travel’s tool of choice. “The entire book is created in InDesign, from pagination to layout studies to final design,” says Burke. “The features I rely on most heavily during production include master pages, object alignment, optical kerning, optical margin alignment, and all of the styles palettes.”

Trek converted to InDesign long ago. Burke recalls, “I jumped on the train right away with InDesign’s first version. James Wamser at Sells Printing Company suggested that I give it a try. He had demonstrated it for me at a training seminar. After about 30 minutes of finding my way around the interface, I knew I wouldn’t be turning back.”

class=”p3″>At the time, Trek Travel didn’t exist, and Burke oversaw several designers working for Trek and other brands under the Trek umbrella. “I played with InDesign for about two days before ordering licenses for the entire design department. I told the designers to jump in whenever they wanted to, and one by one, they came to me singing its praises.”

Burke says that her staff made the switch easily because of their familiarity with Illustrator and Photoshop. “InDesign plays so well with those programs,” she explains, “so designers and production artists don’t have to waste a lot of time getting their support files just right.” However, she adds, “it would be nice if the copy/paste functionality between InDesign and Illustrator worked both ways instead of just from Illustrator to InDesign.”

Since you’ve read this far, you might as well turn the page and look at Trek Travel’s catalog and calendar. But if you end up spending your new equipment budget on a week-long bike trip through California wineries, don’t blame me.

2006 CALENDAR: Who wouldn’t want to pedal down this New Zealand road? More tantalizing photos span every calendar page.

2006 TRIP CATALOG: The front cover sets the stage.

2006 TRIP CATALOG: The opening spread (top), and inside spreads tempting readers with trips to the Canadian Rockies (middle) and northern California’s wine-laden Napa, Sonoma, and Alexander valleys (bottom).