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Discover Area Guides

A row of Discover Area Guides covers standing in front of a mountain landscape.
Covers from the guide series.

The problem

Jack Johnson publishes Discover Area Guides, a regional travel guide series covering seven communities, with eight to ten guides a year. A publisher that size doesn’t have a design department, an IT department, or a production manager. It has whoever it can rely on.

The approach

I’ve been that since 2018. More than 50 guides so far — covers, page layouts, the ad grid, and the maps inside them.

The maps turned into their own series. Town maps for the guides, wall maps printed to sell, and an interactive Cassia County driving tour built in Google My Maps. the Bear Lake map is the one that goes on a wall.

I designed and built Discover Heritage Hub and I host it, and I keep DiscoverAreaGuides.com maintained.

Between issues it’s whatever the publication needs: running production in Maribel, the magazine manager they track ad sales and flat-plan each guide in, keeping the shared Drive in order, fixing data entry errors, and troubleshooting whatever comes up.

The outcome

Eight years, more than 50 guides, and two websites, one of which holds 324 articles and 629 local resources. The guides reached nearly 30,000 households in 2023–24, and the driving tour has been viewed more than 3,400 times. The work keeps widening because I know enough about the pieces around the design to be useful when something new comes up.

Street grid of downtown Montpelier with lettered business locations, bordered by business listings and logos.
A town map from the guide series, built to the publication’s page size.
“Who shops at IFA?” ad listing store departments and brands, with photos of the Logan store, chicks, livestock feed and beekeeping supplies.
A full-page advertiser in the guides. Layout by me; photos supplied by IFA or taken by Jack Johnson.
Detail of the IFA ad: Ariat, Redmond, Camp Chef and Tarter logos above a bulleted list of departments — Lawn & Garden, Outdoor Power Equipment, Farm & Ranch, Feed & Supplies, Clothing & Footwear, Bees and Wild Birds, Tools & Hardware — ending “and MUCH MORE!”
The brand row and department list from the same ad. The logos are IFA’s and the brands’.
The headline row of the IFA ad: the IFA mountain logo beside “Who Shops at IFA?” over “Farmers • Ranchers, Homeowners and Everyone!”, under a strip of weathered wood.
The headline row across the top of the same ad.
The Discover Heritage Hub home page: the site name over a regional map, with an introduction to the site below.
Discover Heritage Hub, designed, built, and hosted for the same publisher.

Discover Area Guides is a DBA of Slider Solutions. The editorial content and research are theirs. Design, production, the maps, and the websites are mine.

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