Naturelich Games

Michael Menzel, the graphic designer for Thurn und Taxis has released a Making of Thurn und Taxis. He describes how his work started in Autumn 2005 with cover design work. During the game fair Essen 2005, Michael met Karen and Andreas Seyfarth the game designers. Interestingly enough, at that point in time, the game had more than the set of 4 support characters. These were planned to become regular cards. I presume these were to be taken in a similar fashion as in Puerto Rico (but this is speculation).
After the Essen fair, Michael continued his work by diving into the archives of the Thurn und Taxis family. With support by Peter Styra (Archive Director) this step was key in creating the dense and authentic design of the game.
The development of the board and the map was a collaborative effort between publisher, game designers and graphic designer. Michael's article includes images of three earlier versions of the board design. Although not too much detail is visible, this section clearly hints at how labor-intensive the graphic design process can be.
During this process it was decided to add small city-specific illustrations to the board. This required additional research to identify and create the sights as well as a lot of work during the Christmas holiday season. The design had to be finished in January in order to make the Nuremberg 2006 release.
And it did. It was probably during this time that a small Easter Egg was added to the board: A small toy (rocking horse) is displayed in the city of Nürnberg (just above the "r") as an homage to one of the biggest game events of the year and probably also to the over-hours required to make this deadline.

Altogether Michael Menzel has created a wonderful look behind-the-scenes providing plenty of interesting details on this year's Spiel des Jahres.