Big book project
Group project Illustrating an existing children's book and repositioning the target audience.
My Role - Creative direction, composition and layout, illustration, editorial and print.
Challenge:
This collaborative project challenged the team to re-design and illustrate Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children for adults. We were given an open brief to decide how to illustrate the book, so decided we wanted to focus our book re-design to help children with dyslexia. An estimate of around 1 in 10 people have dyslexia but are often still misunderstood by parents, educators and/or employers.
Solution:
As a team, we decided to use the project to create a Dyslexia simulation book for parents, teachers or guardians, who care for children with Dyslexia. The book aims to mimic the variations of difficulty for children with dyslexia and what they may see when trying to read. The book can act as a tool for adults to better understand and relate to the everyday struggles of those with Dyslexia. As well as creating a book simulation, we also wanted to include some pages with tips on how to help children with dyslexia.
Visual Identity:
We wanted to create an authentic experience for the reader, so we interviewed people with dyslexia to try and describe what they see. In order to mimic this, we applied a number of distortions to the text for each poem, some were jumbled, scattered or distorted. Through our research, we discovered that, often, coloured filters helped people with dyslexia to read better, so it gave us an idea. With our jumbled text, we also wanted it to be legible for the adults buying the book, so we added a red filter effect to the text. The red filter meant, when a piece of red acetate was placed on top, it revealed the actual text of the poem underneath. This also influenced our illustrations: using the same principle, we created red illustrations with hidden blue illustrations. The red filter also revealed these images once placed over the illustrations.
