Swindon Urban Orienteering

Swindon Orienteering Challenge: A5 booklet of maps and instructions

In order to encourage residents and visitors to explore their town by bike or on foot, Swindon Borough Council have invented Urban Orienteering!

There are 36 points located around the town featuring a secret letter which intrepid explorers have to record, either on a form or on an accompanying app. Once they’re all collected, competitors can enter a prize draw. Rather than offer users prescribed trails to follow, the emphasis is very much on users to decide upon their own routes to visit all the locations. 

The widely-dispersed 36 points are broken-down into six more manageable ‘quests’ based on six areas of the town, and six individual maps were created of those quests instead of one borough-wide map. Five of the maps are at 1:14,000 and one is at 1:16,000, meaning most streets could be named. Three maps are A4 landscape, two are A4 portrait, and one is A5 portrait.

In addition, a square-format overview map putting the six quests in context within the borough was designed and features on the back cover.

Rather than present these six maps and accompanying information in one conventional, folding, large-sheet printed map, it was instead decided to package it all as a slightly more unusual A5 booklet. The format works extremely well in that the 16 A5 pages can be printed on one sheet of A2 paper meaning it’s very economical and convenient to produce.