Daydream achiever

Jennifer Hill of Jamaica Plain displays some of the travel posters she has designed that depict locales she has not visited. She calls the line Places I Have Never Been. (Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff)

Designer Jennifer Hill may be the ultimate armchair tourist. From the Jamaica Plain home she shares with her fiance and her cat, she has traveled to Bangkok, Block Island, and Bordeaux, all through the intricately patterned travel posters, calendars, and cards that she designs after exhaustive research and a lot of daydreaming. What differentiates her series of travel posters from others is that Hill designs for places that she's never visited. Hence the name of her line, Places I Have Never Been. She recently completed her 2009 Places I Have Never Been calendar, available at www.jhilldesign.com.

Q. How did you come up with the idea to design travel posters for places you've never visited?

A. One night I was driving to New Hampshire and I was listening to Modest Mouse. They have a song with a lyric that says "We named our children after towns we've never been to." And that's how the whole thing started. I'm a big daydreamer. I think about traveling and exploring all the time.

Q. How do you pick locations for posters you'll design, especially since you haven't seen them?

A. A lot of times they'll be inspired by friends who take trips and show me pictures from their vacations. Sometimes I'll read something about a place. Sometimes I'll hear something on the radio that catches my attention. But I have to admit that a lot of my designs are inspired by food. Dave [Battilana, her fiance] has a family that is involved with food. His mom's a chef, and his sister is a food writer. So something like a doughnut festival or making limoncello can be pretty exciting to me.

Q. Your pattern choices can be surprising. The pattern for the Galway, Ireland, poster is flowers, and Michigan is cherries. I'd expect to see the cherries for Washington D.C.

A. Cherries for Washington is such an easy way out. I don't want to do your typical Vermont maple leaves. I don't want a pattern that's too literal. I have a friend who's always talking about the breweries in Portland, Oregon, so the pattern I made for that design was hops flowers. I used flowers for Galway because my grandmother visited Ireland in 1984 and she wrote in her travel journal about these little yellow flowers all over the countryside.

Q. Does your research ever inspire you to travel to these places after you've designed the poster?

A. What's funny is that they inspire trips for other people. I designed a Savannah [Georgia] poster, and suddenly my mom was taken to Savannah by her boyfriend. A month later I created a travel poster for Mexico, and then my fiance went to Mexico.

Q. Do you ever rush to put out a print because you know you're going to be visiting a place?

A. I just did. We're going to Morocco on our honeymoon. I wasn't going to miss a chance to create a Moroccan print, so I designed a Marrakesh poster. CHRISTOPHER MUTHER