Personal Project
Road Trip Guide
WEBSITE AND PRINTED DOCUMENT (THE HOLY BINDER)
The Road Trip Guide is my excuse to use my favorite design tools and create a somewhat overkill guide to an upcoming cross-country road trip. The goal was to present important information for this trip in a manner that could easily be utilized while actively on the road.
Project Duration:
2 Weeks – June/July 2025
My Role:
My Partners:
Coffee and a free Figma account
the Problem and Ask
A cross-country, month-long road trip takes a lot of planning
I need to create a way to access the important info while on the road
How might I…
Primary Tasks
Planning the trip
With plans to attend my friends and my alma mater's football game in Idaho and a visit to my partner's family in California, there were already some key dates locked in. Knowing this, I needed to figure out how to get to Idaho and California, and what we could fit in between.
In the images below, you will see the process of planning the "how". This was a messy process starting with paper and pencil, along with many eraser streaks. The research included lots of mapping, looking into sunrise and sunset times, and learning about each destination and feasible accommodations. I was able to dial in the route and overall itinerary, and from here, I began to to think about the best way to present all of this information.
Planning Images
How?
The big debate: offline or online
Why not both?
Offline — The Holy Binder
The Holy Binder was my solution to surviving without cell service. Along the route, there will be many dead zones, and being prepared for an emergency situation is a must for me. While I plan to have downloaded maps on our devices, there's always the small chance things could go sideways. So off to the store I go to buy a binder and colorful dividers!
Online — The Website
The primary reason for an online version of this guide was to provide a way for worried family members to follow along on this journey. I needed an easy way to share the plan with others in a way that was a bit more fun than emailing a giant PDF. Secondarily, I'll be using a tablet as a command center, and a website would be an easily accessible way to reference the itinerary.
the Process
Designing the physical & digital
How I approached the same content across two types of deliverables
The Holy Binder
I began my process with the printed document. This allowed me to build one document that I could reference while making the website version of this content. For the binder, I created an outline including sections and their corresponding subsections. There was a mini-outline for the content I wanted within each day's page. These outlines and trip itinerary are shown below.
The Website
With the website, I approached this version a bit differently. While I already knew what content I wanted to include, I needed to explore how the user (mainly myself) would interact with the content. Below are the preliminary wireframes and user flow that guided the final website creation process.
Outlines + Sketches
Final Designs
The deliverables
Below are some images of both the offline and online guides
No live link for privacy purposes.
the outcome
Below are my thoughts and findings from this project
Looking back to reflect, learn, and improve
Main Takeaways
This may have been overkill: Was creating all this necessary? Possibly not, but as of now, I haven't completed this trip and can't come to a clear conclusion.
This was fun: I really enjoyed treating this task as a design project. At first, the idea of planning this road trip was daunting; however, diving into familiar tools and processes made this an enjoyable experience.
Details
As I finished creating the Road Trip Guide, I began to reflect on why I did this in the first place. Well, as a person and a designer, this was in my comfort zone. Instead of opening up a big, scary, blank Excel document, I opened Figma. This just made sense. Getting all the messy work done on paper and bringing the refined ideas to life on the screen was something I felt would be good practice and a chance to explore creative ideas with full freedom. This was truly just for fun and something I had a wonderful time doing.