In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was fashionable to take a boat tour down the Wye Valley, to view its romantic sites and picturesque landscape. ‘Tourists’ dined at specific locations, took walks to particular viewpoints and visited specific romantic ruins, making the ‘Wye Tour’ one of the first ‘package holidays’!

In the early twenty-first century Adventa approached Dispirito to help them create a brochure guide book to helps locals and visitors enjoy these most ‘picturesque’ sites that were visited by the early tourists. Some of the views are remarkably similar today, others show considerable change in the landscape, but one thing all the sites still have in common is their ability to inspire.

Working closely with Adventa, and Researcher/Copywriter, Ruth Waycot from Wye Knot Tourism, Dispirito Design set about recreating this journey that explored all the places the Wye River passed on its journey south from Ross-on-Wye to Chepstow.

Producing the A5 colour brochure brought together an exciting selection of facts, quotations, photographs & illustrations  to enthrall and entice... and it was Dispirito Design's responsibility to weave them together to allow each area on the journey to tell its own story, yet still seem part of the tour.

We decided to use a blend of colours from the very bright and exciting to the more muted tones of tan and sepia. We wanted to create a clearly modern looking brochure but that could also have been a sketch book from all those years ago. We worked on this blend by mixing old maps with new artwork and photographs, and overlaying ephemera as if collected on the way. This blend of the old and new weaves it way throughout the pages enticing the reader to keep exploring the pages and hopefully the real locations afterwards too.

The brochure and the tour it brought back to life proved to be a real success, so a website to support it was created with Dispirito Design providing the design.

(Dispirito Design also went on to work with Adventa to produce banners, exhibitions and adverts to support the tour.)