Produced every 3 months by the Rural Media Company, Travellers’ Times is known affectionately as “the book” by Gypsies, Roma and Travellers across Britain. Its news and features inform and connect the community with itself and those sympathetic to it.

Its print run of 23,000 copies is read by at least 100,000 people in the community and public and voluntary organisations that provide services to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people. Its purpose is so important that the greatest complaint about the magazine is that it isn’t produced often enough and there isn’t enough of them.

Dispirito Design has worked with the team at The Rural Media Company since the summer of 2006 when Dispirito won the tender to re-design the magazine.

Previously Travellers’ Times had been produced in just red and black, but as this did not do justice to the colourful content a full colour redesign was requested.

As with all magazines, the production time for each issue is often short to ensure the content is up-to-date – but this can put a lot of pressure on maintaining the creativity of each issue. We did not want to lower the quality of the design, but knew that extra time would not be available, so tackled this by giving each section within the magazine its own style. The news pages – which are often the last to be created are based on a stricter system enabling them to be produced quickly, but the features pages and photography led centre spread can vary more each issue as we have longer to work on them.

"This approach gave us the desired flexibility for pages to maximise use of images while keeping it clear how the page needed to be designed. This gives a successful balance between keeping each issue fresh as well as delivered on time. Dispirito are always keen to look beyond the obvious and find ways of offering a higher quality solution than the budget might initially suggest was possible."
Maria Dispirito, Design Director of Dispirito Design.