Digital Place Plans for Antur Cymru: bilingual brochure design for six Ceredigion towns
Antur Cymru Enterprise is a social enterprise based in Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthenshire, providing business support to companies and communities across Mid and West Wales. Its SMART Busnes programme, funded through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, helps rural and town-centre businesses make better use of digital technology.
As part of that programme, Antur Cymru produced a Digital Place Plan for each of the six Ceredigion towns it supports – Cardigan, Aberystwyth, Lampeter, Llandysul, Aberaeron and Tregaron. Each plan takes a practical look at how a town performs online, and how connected technology and data, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices, could help it work better for residents, businesses and visitors. I was asked to design the published brochures.
Six towns, one design system
Each plan had to stand on its own as a document about one particular town, while clearly belonging to the same family. I created a single design system covering the cover, contents, town summary, project pages and outcome panels, then applied it consistently across all six brochures.
The project pages carry most of the detail, so they needed a structure a reader could scan quickly. Each project sits in its own colour-coded panel with a vision, description, options, examples and intended outcomes, supported by simple line icons. That repeated pattern lets someone find the section they care about without reading the document end to end, and it kept production efficient across six separate titles.
Bilingual by design, not as an afterthought
Every brochure was published in both English and Welsh. Bilingual publishing is easy to get wrong at the layout stage: Welsh text usually runs longer than the English equivalent, and a layout that only just fits in one language will break in the other.
I built the templates with that in mind, allowing for text expansion in headings, panels and captions so both language versions share the same page structure and the same visual quality. Neither version reads as a translation squeezed into a layout designed for the other – an important point for an organisation whose service to Welsh communities is bilingual by principle.
Original watercolour illustrations for every cover
Rather than use stock photography, I produced an original watercolour illustration for each town cover – Cardigan, Aberystwyth, Lampeter, Llandysul, Aberaeron and Tregaron, each painted as its own place. Painted illustration gives the set warmth and a sense of character that photography of a working high street rarely achieves, and it treats each town as somewhere distinctive rather than a case study.
The illustrations sit within a consistent cover layout alongside the town name, the Digital Place Plan 2026 title and the Antur Cymru, Ceredigion County Council and UK Government funding marks, so the series reads as one coherent set on a shelf or a stand.
A digital story told in print
There is a nice irony in a set of printed brochures making the case for digital technology, and it is the right call. A physical document can be handed round a town council meeting, left on a counter or worked through by a regeneration group together – which is exactly how these plans are being used. The Lampeter plan was presented to the town’s regeneration partnership and prompted new project ideas almost immediately.
The programme was featured on Business News Wales in Digital Makeover Helps Welsh Town Centres Compete for Customers, and you can read more about the organisation behind it at Antur Cymru Enterprise.
If you need a report, brochure or bilingual publication that looks considered and works properly in both languages, GD Graphics offers print design for organisations and public-sector projects. You can see more work in the GD Graphics portfolio.