Whenever a route lands in our inbox, it is never just a set of coordinates. It might be a honeymoon, or a fiftieth birthday, or a motorcycle trip that crossed most of a continent. It might be the summer someone finally rode the coast they had been thinking about for years, or a campervan winding through half a dozen countries, or four friends who kept saying they would do the trip one day and then actually went and did it. By the time it reaches us, somebody has already lived it, and our job is to give it back to them in a way they can hang it in their home and look at every day.
That is really the whole business, so we thought we would show you how it works.
We used to design everything ourselves, and then we built the Studio
For years every single design came off our own desks. You would send us an email, we would research your route, design it, and send you a draft to look at. That still happens and we genuinely love doing it.
But we have been dreaming about a studio of our own since the very beginning of Tell Your Trail. We wanted it to be easier for anyone to end up with a beautiful reminder of their adventure on the wall, without having to wait on the two of us to get to it. Over the last eighteen months or so we finally managed to build it, and it is now live. We are enormously proud of it, and of how much freedom it puts in your hands.
You can upload your route, or build it up point by point if you do not have a file, and then add your own points of interest — the café you stopped at, the campsite, the spot where everything went wrong — and choose an icon for each one. You pick the colours and the title, and you watch the whole thing come together as you go. Before you can order, a preview comes up so you can check every detail, and nothing goes any further until you approve it.
The three ways people come to us
Almost everything we make falls into one of three groups, and they work quite differently, so it is worth knowing which one you are.
A trail that should be in the collection. Some people write to us about a well-known long-distance route we have not designed yet. There is a long list of trails we would love to get to, and the North Coast Trail, the Menalon Trail, the Dales Way and the Old Ghost Road are all sitting on it at the moment. If it is a trail we can do justice to, we will take it on: you place the order, we do the research and the design, and once it is finished it goes onto the website for everyone. We will also come back to you and ask what you think, because you have very likely been out there yourself and we have not, and if something about it does not look right to you then we want to know before anyone else sees it.
Occasionally we have to say no to one of these. If a route is very short, or so remote that there is almost nothing around it to give the line something to sit against, we will tell you honestly rather than sell you a design we are not proud of. It is not an email we enjoy writing, but we would much rather write it.
A design from the collection, made yours. If the trail is already on our website, you can have it with your dates on it, or your name, a different title, or a colour that suits your room better. We are genuinely relaxed about colour, and happy to work in one we would never have chosen ourselves, because it is your wall and not ours. This is the quickest of the three, and you can do most of it yourself in the Studio.
Something entirely your own. We started out with hiking, and hiking is still very close to our hearts, but a trail is whatever you covered the ground on. A road trip, a motorcycle ride across a continent, a campervan route, a cycling tour, a walk, horse riding, a sailing passage. If it mattered to you, it is a trail. This is also where the Studio has changed the most: you can now build a trip like this yourself, point by point, and see it come together as you go. Or you can send it to us and we will design it for you, as we always have. We have never yet turned down a bespoke design, because somewhere in a trip that mattered enough to print, there is always something to work with.
Finding the route you actually took
For a route that already exists on maps, this part turns into detective work, which is far more enjoyable than it probably sounds. Our first stop is always the trail itself: the organisation that manages it, or the local tourism board, if there is an official website at all. That is the closest thing to a definitive version. From there we work outwards through AllTrails, Google Maps, OpenStreetMap and anything else we can get our hands on, and they never quite agree with each other. Not wildly, but enough that we have to sit with them for a while before we are confident we have the right version.
And sometimes there simply is not one version. The Colorado Trail, for example, splits into the Collegiate West and the Collegiate East, and both of them are the trail, so at that point it stops being research and becomes a question for you: which one did you do?
If it is your own trip, we will work from whatever you can give us. A GPX or KML file if you recorded one, or a list in Word or Excel of the places you went and the order you went in, which works just as well. The towns, the overnight stops, and the places that hold a particular memory. We would always rather have too much from you than too little, so send more than you think we need.
The part that takes the longest, and we would not want it any shorter
Every design is made in Adobe Illustrator, one at a time. The map goes down first, then the route, and then the points of interest.
It is easily the slowest part of the whole process, and we have no interest in speeding it up, because almost all of that time goes into things you are never meant to consciously notice. How a name sits against a coastline, whether a peak marker is crowding your route, where a label needs a bit of room to breathe. When those things are right the poster simply looks correct, and when they are not, something feels slightly off and nobody can quite explain why.
The one we have not cracked yet
We get asked for topographic lines fairly regularly, and we would like to do them. When we have tried, the contour lines end up fighting with the route, and your trail stops being the first thing your eye lands on, which is really the whole point of the poster.
So it is not something we offer today, but it is something we are working on. Getting it right would open up mountaineering routes properly, which is where the terrain matters as much as the line, and that is a part of the collection we would love to build. It is going to take us more practice before we are happy with it. When we are, you will hear about it.
And then it is over to you
You will have a first draft from us within two to three working days. We keep our weekends for getting out of the house, so if you send something over on a Friday evening, it will be the following week before you hear from us.
After that it becomes a conversation, and every custom order includes two rounds of changes, and more than that if it is what we need to get it right. Nothing is ever printed until you have told us you are happy with it.
If everything falls into place quickly, a design can be finished and ready to go to the printer in about five working days. That is the fastest it realistically happens rather than a promise, because how long it actually takes depends on how much you want changed and how quickly the two of us can go back and forth with you.
Paper is not a screen
Your poster is printed on high-quality matte paper, and paper does its own thing with colour. Most of the time what arrives is exactly what you approved, but every now and then there is a slight difference between the file on the screen and the sheet that comes out of the printer.
Beige is the one that has caught us out. It has come back lighter than we designed it a couple of times, closer to white than the warm tone we had in mind, and when that happens, we simply have it reprinted and send a new one your way. We are mentioning it here because we would much rather you hear it from us.
Six years in, and still getting better at it
We started all of this back in 2020, on the other side of the world, and these days we design from Vittorio Veneto, on a hillside with vineyards on three sides of us, which is not a bad place to be drawing somebody else's mountains.
Now for the honest bit. There are designs in our collection from the early years that we would make quite differently today. Not because they were bad, we were proud of them at the time and still are, but because six years of doing this every single day has taught us an enormous amount, and our skills and our style have come a long way in that time. So we are slowly working our way back through the older designs and bringing them up to where we are now.
Which is probably good news if you are about to order something from us, because there is no back catalogue sitting here running on autopilot. Whatever you send us, you get the version of us that exists this year, and next year we will hopefully be better again.