CNT Guides

The brief was not a document. It was the system behind several.

The Confédération Nationale du Tourisme publishes practical guides for the Moroccan hospitality sector — long-form, researched, and produced on a schedule.

A series has to look like a series. The work was a format, a grid and a type hierarchy consistent enough that each new guide reads as part of the same publication, and clear enough that the guides could be produced after handover without a designer laying out every page.

A5 portrait — sized to be carried, not filed.

These are working documents for hotel operators, so the format is pocket-sized rather than presentational. The grid is built for dense institutional French: long paragraphs that still have to be read, with margins generous enough to survive justification.

Full-bleed dividers break the document into sections you can find.

Each module opens on a full-bleed photographic divider carrying the module number and its title at display size. They do the work a contents page cannot: they tell you where you are while you are thumbing through.

Every interior page carries a running head with the confederation and the document title, so a page photocopied or shared on its own still identifies itself.

The deliverable that outlasts the first guide.

The type hierarchy — module titles, section headings, lead-ins, body, folios — is specified rather than improvised, which is what makes the series reproducible. Subsequent guides are built from the template instead of designed from scratch.

It is the same idea as a brand system applied to a publication: the work is not the artefact, it is the thing that lets other people make the next one correctly.