Project
Cais
Identity
Editorial design
Packaging
2025
The brief
Cais publishes pocket walking guides to the north of Portugal, written by people who live on the routes: a fisherman’s son on the coast path, a forest ranger in the Gerês. It started in 2019 with one guide to Gaia’s riverside and now has fourteen, sold in bookshops, cafés and by subscription. Every cover had been a different photograph, so the series looked like fourteen publishers on a shelf, and readers didn’t know there was more than the one in their hand. Cais wanted a series people would collect, starting with three new titles in spring 2025.
The idea
Every guide is one walk, so every cover is that walk: the route traced from the author’s own GPS track and drawn as a single line on cream, with a dot where it starts and a ring where it ends. Only the title and the colour of the line change between titles, above a grey band the colour of Porto’s granite quays. On a shelf the series reads as a set of routes, and a reader can tell a coast path from a mountain climb before opening one.
The guides
A6, 96 to 140 pages, sewn so they open flat in one hand. Each route has its own colour, used for the line on the cover and the route on every map inside.
Inside
Hand-drawn maps with no words on them, only the route and numbered stops, and photographs by the authors facing the text that tells you where to turn.
The subscription
Subscribers get four guides a year in a flat grey box that fits a letterbox. The first box comes with a tote printed with that spring’s three routes.
On the shelf
In bookshops the guides stand in rows by colour; in cafés along the routes they sit in small wire racks by the till.
What changed
The three spring titles came out in April 2025, and the eleven older guides were reissued in the new covers by the autumn. Bookshops now order the series as a set, and cafés on the routes stock the one that passes their door.
Credits
Okapi: Beatriz Correia (series design), Ana Pires (maps), Marta Lobo (copy)
Cais: Sofia Moreira (publisher), Tiago Leite (editor)
With: printed and sewn in Porto; photography by Rafael Costa
