PMI Travel Magazine
My experience working with a professional client and creating a digital magazine for their vacation rental platform.
I was tasked with creating a magazine for a client for my Digital Publishing II class this semester. I decided to pitch a digital magazine to my boss and the job I work at right now. After them being fairly excited to start and bouncing from person to person on who wanted to take on this project with me and be my actual client and contact I landed on our brand new vacation rental platform. My direct client is the wonderful and fun-loving Billy O’Sullivan. He is always pushing the limits and encourages new technology within the new platform. Naturally, he and I meshed very well and were able to come up with this magazine to show off just how cutting-edge PMI Travel really is.
DEALING WITH FAILURE TO LAUNCH:
I started out with a few ideas for the magazine, originally we were planning on creating it as a piece for franchisees to use, and show off their specific area and properties. This ended up being much harder than I had expected. Getting people to send the information I needed was a struggle, and because the platform was so new (the vacation platform, and the digital magazine idea) people were hesitant to get their feet wet. After some sketching and a little bit of designing, I felt stuck and unhappy with how the design was coming along. I was lacking inspiration and content, so I decided to go back to Billy with my concerns and feelings about how the magazine was going.
The original idea was to have an introduction article about what and who PMI Travel is, give some information about the technology they have and what else they have to offer. Then there would be different articles for different areas where people had franchises; Ft Lauderdale, San Jose, Park City, etc. Each of those articles would have an introduction page, a page explaining their area and what it has to offer, a page about the PMI Team there, a travel article about something fun to do in their area (something that would make people want to go visit and stay in their properties), and finally, a page with their properties and virtual tours of them. All of these ideas were dreamed up by me before I have really started and fully understood where people were with their properties aka no one had virtual tours completed yet, and most people didn’t have time to figure out what was fun in their area and write an article about it. I had planned to bite off more than I could chew basically. I came to Billy and explained this to him, and he told me that this happens to all good visionaries. You just dream up something completely awesome, but unfortunately, we don’t always have the means to get there. No worries, let’s switch it to be more of a marketing piece.
“I wouldn’t mind using it to show off just how cutting-edge and bombastic PMI Travel is to potential buyers.”
From there we took the magazine in a whole different direction. Instead of a cool piece to attract new travelers, it is now a cool piece to show off to potential investors and buyers of PMI Travel. It now was going to include all the information about the technologies PMI offers, the support system, who they were as a company, and how PMI Travel is going to change the vacation rental world.
DESIGNING THE MAGAZINE
I was able to use some of the design plans from sketches I had already made for the original magazine, and come up with some designs on the spot. Sometimes when I feel the inspiration flowing it’s easier to create inside of InDesign.
From there I was able to get content from the PMI Travel Website and rework it to fit into magazine form. I wanted it to echo the same feeling that we had already created for PMI Travel. In terms of branding and style guides, be a design expert for PMI and working directly with their creative director really gave me an upper hand. I know the brand and style, and even the hex code values by heart. Not to mention myself and my boss were the ones who were creating all of the marketing material for PMI Travel in the first place. I was confident in creating a magazine that would blend with the rest of the pieces for PMI Travel. I did take a look at the colors that we were trying to incorporate into the new platform and the new font. There is one font that we use for everything: Swis721. But for vacation, we were introducing a new font to the mix, Dear Prudence. I wanted to incorporate both into the design of the magazine as well as the PMI colors.
I also wanted to incorporate as much beautiful photography as I could while still keeping the clean look of PMI Travel. Luckily through PMI, I have access to a huge image library, and if I don’t find exactly what I am looking for Unsplash always has a ton of photos to bring to the table. Because the vacation rental platform is trying to push that you can make any place into a vacation rental destination, not just tropical places, I wanted to get a wide variety of photos. I wanted some showing off snowy mountains, sandy beaches, lit up cities, and lush jungles.
INTERACTIVITY AND USABILITY
The thing that makes this magazine stand out from a typical print magazine or a powerpoint presentation is that it is interactive. The goal is for the user to be able to work through it and discover all of the interactive content that explains concepts and services presented by PMI Travel. I order for people to fully understand and know what they are supposed to do to when it comes to the interactivity I initially just put on leading icons to explain everything. After some user testing, I realized that the icons weren’t cutting it and that there needed to be some more icons or instructions explaining what the user should do and what is possible. I wrote out instructions for certain things I thought were a little confusing or that I found people skipped over. I added when and where to swipe, tapping specific items, and included a navigation guide that I hope people will actually take the time to look over. Other than that, there are a few items that don’t have instructions, but the icons or how they were laid out was self-explanatory enough that people knew what to do.
Some of the main struggles I have with the interactivity and usability of these magazines are that they are so new people are not used to working through them. People are used to clicking buttons on a website, not doing a physical gesture like swiping to get to another page. In order to explain these differences in experience, I have created a navigation guide. The problem with this is that a lot of people won’t read it. I have made a few other magazines with a navigation guide and I feel like people just skip over it, they are confused about how to work through the magazine. This is why I have the instructions written out about what to do, but there are some things that I cannot spell out without taking away from the user’s experience. So I am still working on a happy medium of instructions to design.
My main attempt to fix this problem of people not reading the navigation guide I made it into a pop-up on the table of contents page. It is obvious that something is there for people to look at. I think the plus button catches peoples attention and lets them know something is there so that people will actually tap on it. Most of the other publications I’ve made, you have to swipe to another page to see the guide and I think that is one of the reasons why people skip over it. Either they don’t know it’s there or it is too much work to swipe to another page. From my testing, this obvious pop-up method has had better results.
FINAL THOUGHTS AND EXPERIENCES
During this project, I was faced with a large bump in the road that I had to deal with for the project to get where it needed to go. I learned from this mistake and I will fully talk through what the end goal for the project is and where the product could best be implemented before I start work in the future. I think there just wasn’t enough understanding of what the product was and what I was capable of with it before I started work on the initial project. All of that being said, I really appreciate the ease of working with Billy and the PMI Travel team to create this magazine. This experience has given me a taste of what it is like to work with a client on a long-term project that I can learn from in the future.
As I create more and more publications I can see the best ways to lay it out and how much instruction is needed to explain to people what to do.
This project opened up a world of corporate magazine opportunities that could change trade shows and sales presentations forever.
