Canyon Trail Club: Vintage Western Travel Decals & Desert Roadside Ephemera
Lately I’ve been exploring a new illustration direction inspired by vintage roadside souvenir decals, faded motel matchbooks, western travel clubs, and dusty highway epheera from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
This collection started with a simple question:
What would a fictional desert touring club from 1971 look like if its graphics were cheaply screenprinted at a roadside print shop somewhere near the Grand Canyon?
The result became a growing system of hand-drawn western travel graphics built around imagined roadside destinations, motel stops, canyon routes, mule riding clubs, trading posts, and forgotten highway tourism culture.
Rather than polished retro branding, the goal was to capture the imperfections that make old travel ephemera feel real:
slightly uneven typography, shaky ink lines, imperfect print registration, faded color palettes, awkward spacing, and commercially hand-drawn illustration.
The collection pulls visual inspiration from:
vintage western matchbooks
old Arizona and Route 66 travel decals
roadside motel brochures
desert souvenir stickers
national park ephemera
1960s–1970s highway tourism graphics
cheaply printed western advertising
Each piece is intentionally simple and slightly imperfect — built with thin ink lines, minimal detail, hand-painted lettering, light hatching, and restrained color palettes inspired by sun-faded roadside print materials.
The illustrations feature recurring desert motifs including:
touring wagons and highway cars
open desert roads
canyon cliffs and mesas
cactus forms and desert plants
western arrows and stars
roadside signage
trading posts and motel architecture
A big part of the process has been resisting over-designing the artwork. The charm comes from keeping the illustrations commercially simple and slightly awkward — more like something you’d actually find in a dusty gift shop off Route 66 than a polished modern retro brand recreation.
This is still an evolving illustration system, and I’m interested in expanding it further into additional fictional roadside destinations, western travel insignias, park decals, motel graphics, maps, souvenir-style packaging, and other tourism-inspired applications.
