Final Designs for Children’s Book:

Design Process

The design process of this book derived from my own experiences on being colourblind. When given the brief of dealing with a troubling matter I immediately leapt towards colourblindness. Children can be turned away from the arts because of this hinderance. However, they shouldn’t. The book covers the story of ‘Colourblind Karl’ and his own frustrations. The narrative is weak in the aspect that the character of ‘Colourblind Karl’ is not explored in depth. However, this was soon the intention behind the book. The main focal point is ‘Karl’s 5 Colourblind Tips’. These tips are meant to encourage children to reach their full potential and harness their creativity.

The book itself lacks any kind of technical skill. However, I leaned more towards a photographic montage book. This was because I wanted to move away from illustrated drawings and focus on having a character that children could be familiar with. The first 4 pages of the main book are very disjointed and remain not formulaic through the work. This is to represent the frustrations that ‘Colourblind Karl’ faces when he is trying to do his work. It is a disorder created through disorder. The final 2 pages are then arranged in a formulaic layout. This is to show the reorganisation of ‘Karl’s’ mind and his own self-belief. So despite the lack of any real technical abilities shown in the production of the book. I focused on a layout that would represent the mending of disorder to create harmony.

My design was heavily influenced by DVARTWORKS. Therefore I chose to create contrast through using RED/GREEN, PURPLE/BLUE, BLUE/YELLOW and PINK/GREY. This further supports the creation of disorder on the page through the random placement.

Conclusive Comments

Given the chance to make this piece stronger I would increase the amount of technical skill applied to this brief. I have kept the overall design very simplistic to suit my target audience, however I would like to take this even further to develop a different style to be applied to the same audience.

Before uploading to the gallery I will change the grammatical errors and clean up the whole design.

Development of Work inDesign

To start realising the concept of this book I took a series of images in a photographic montage that would form the basis of the story. Through this I wanted to convey key emotions and actions that would aid in the development of a storyline.

At this point the storyline is as follows:

1. This is Karl. Karl is colourblind.

Karl found out he was colourblind when he was 7.

Since then he has had trouble with reds, greens,

purple and blues.

2. Karl often does design work that

requires colours.

How does Karl do his work without

colours?

3. Karl gets confused and frustrated with  his work because it doesn’t look good.

This leads to Karl being unhappy.

4. But that doesn’t bring Karl down!

He knows how to use his creativity.

Facts

I chose to include facts about colourblindness at random points to create a more unique design. At this point it does not seem to work effectively and needs to be developed so that there is harmony between the text and images. I don’t think this kind of approach has been taken in a children’s book and because this design aspect is so different it is a brave step in trying to meet the target audience.

Forming Colour

On the second main page I included the main types of colourblindness:

• Red/Green
• Purple/Blue
• Blue/Yellow

These have been reflected with their own colours being featured in an artistic way on the page. More development needs to take place to develop the overall layout of the page because it has not come together yet. However, with the right layout the design will look effective.

I was immediately taken by a design for a poster by DVARTWORKS. The design creates disorder on the planet through the separation of the circle that represents the Earth as a whole. The poster essentially is saying that without trees there is no earth.

saves trees. save earth – DVARTWORKS

Using a similar style of design I would like to take the standardised colour tests that feature numbers in a series of bubbles. I have separared the bubble and created disorder and I will use a placeholder image of the character of myself and overlay the two together:

Initial Book Cover

At this point the text is a working title as well as the style of typeface. Depending on the kinds of images I choose to put on the front cover I may choose to have more geometric designs.

(UPDATE)

After the taking the photographic montage I redesigned the front cover to suit the style of the book.

To develop this even further I may choose to fracture the Ishihara test like the DVARTWORK picture. This would sort the fractured design layout that I would like to achieve in this book.

Through research I discovered a promotional video for Colour Blind Awareness #1ineveryclassroom:

Rainbow Song – Colourblind Awareness

‘Cuddle the Cloud sings us the colours of the rainbow and we see how they look to him.’

An exclusive PDF by www.colourblindawareness.org uses the kind of language I want to replicate in my book. It relates to children and how ‘cool’ it can be.

To develop the narrative of this book I looked into the dialogue used in non-fictional children’s books.

To create the narrative I looked into the key themes of this book. These being:

• Colourblindness
• Creativity
• Engagement
• Semi-sensitive issues

I’d consider the main area to focus on is creative engagement. I want to encourage children not to be limited by this minor disability but to use it to their advantage. To engage the children I will use pictures of myself in a comical way. Through this the children can feel like they are conversing with someone else who is colourblind. So the manner of the book is empathetic in a way.

I have named the character of the book ‘Colourblind Karl’, a very simple, generic name. It is childlike in manner and therefore suits the theme of the book. A working title at the moment would be ‘My Life in Grey’ which is almost a satirical take at colourblindness whereby it is extremely rare to be completely colourblind. However, the title itself is witty and simple.

Using the key themes I started to develop a narrative within the book:

Page 1:-

This is Karl. Karl is colourblind.

Karl found out he was colourblind when he was 7.

Since then he has had trouble with reds, greens, purple and blues.

Karl often does design work that require colours.

How does Karl do his work without colours?

The first page works as a introduction to the character portrayed as well as laying down a foundation to critical engagement with the children. It is also not limiting towards encouraging children to take up art/design courses. The language is very simplified for the children and therefore suits the target audience.

An immediate, almost hasty design on the first page would look like this:

Above the white space on the left hand side will be an image introducing the character. The style of the typeface is a placeholder at the moment as well as the text on the right hand side. This design is heavily influenced by the branding for Cosmico, an amateur astronomy festival.

Cosmico Branding

They use their shapes to create order but they are also disorderly placed on the page. This is intrinsically linked to the way that colourblindness is a disorder and I think this will be a suitable design format for engaging children in a creative way.