When Graphic Design meets Travel Content

As part of the process of teaching myself graphic design and learning the base principles, I’ve started creating content for my travel agent Instagram page. There’s no time as good as now for experimenting, considering that my views currently stay consistently below 5000. No one to disappoint and put off with my quirky work.

I’ve decided very early on that my color scheme will be summery and feminine, a playful mix between bright pink and light pink and baby blues, sometimes with slight variations in shade. I wanted to have a colourful and fun page, something that will instantly take the user somewhere on a beach, on a glamorous girl holiday. My first proper iterations have been made on Canva with very minimal reliance on the AI component (used for obtaining graphics that weren’t in the gallery already). They have been part of a carousel post about myself, where I’m talking about my life, my expertise in travelling and passion for this world, all packaged in an excentric hot pink cover hoping to catch the eye.

Since then, while playing around in Canva, I’ve discovered my love for scrapbook-type designs. I think it’s still a current obsession and a delivery mechanism that feels whimsical while still informative. I’ve tried it firstly when creating a thread about different countries and where you should go based on your holiday preferrences. This post helped me learn a bit more about layering and adding more elements without cluttering the image, but making it feel alive and full.

The next post I thought about had a different messaging, one that felt a bit more difficult to deliver in a way that stayed playful and innocent. It came as a result of a conversation with a friend who confessed to me that she doesn’t think my friends are comfortable reaching out to me for help with their holidays as they are too comfortable with their current websites and innately don’t want to change. I felt the need to go on the internet to talk about it, urge people to have an introspective moment and ask themselves if their first choice is the best or just the most familiar. I came up with the idea of a proper girly scrapbook design, where instead of criticising people’s assumptions, I would explain them in a fun way. This is what I came up with initially:

A critique brought to predictable purchasing habits has been turned into a lighthearted scenario which still communicates a complaint, while also reducing its intensity with an approachable and warming design. However, I started to doubt that the design is aligned enough with the rest of my page, hence I decided to adapt it a bit and save the scrapbook template for another time:

I kept it fun and on brand, combining pink with nature images and gen Z motifs, while still sending my messaging across. It opened a whole world of possibilities in terms of using this type of design when tapping into certain topics, and it can definitely be used further for even more political discourse, where you need consumers to stay engaged without the post feeling too heavy.

I ended up using the scrapbook design after all to create an info page as I felt that it could work in that regard:

I am still exploring different types of directions to take and planning to learn new tools, but for now this seems to take shape as the current vibe of my page.