Assignment Seven - 02

Design a Children Storybook - Phase Two (Final)

Styles and Layouts
Body text: Initially we wanted a more kids-like or fanciful font, such as "Comic Sans" as it'll suit our theme. However, our research shows children storybooks using neat and professional font because it is easier for children to read since they are still trying to grasp and learn the words. After trying out various font choices, we decided upon "Verdana" for the above reasons.

Cover text: We used "", a font with edgy corners which is consistent with the design of the illustrations' backgrounds. It is a fun font yet not too fanciful so the words are still distinguishable for kids.

Colors style: We used soft pastel coloring with no shadings so the outlook is clean and clear. Our palette colors are bright pastel colors so the images look lively and appeals to children.

Layout: Illustrations are consistently on the top (2/3 of page) while the story text resides at the bottom (1/3 of page), left aligned. The illustrations have angular backgrounds which are consistent with the shapes of dialogs in the drawings. The borders will contain the illustrations so they are separated from the text and add interest to the design.

Binding: We chose soft cover perfect binding which takes only a day, allowing more buffer time for us to evaluate and edit our storybook. It also costs significantly lesser than hard cover.

Illustrations Edits
Tools: Sketchbook, Scanner, Adobe Illustrator

After planning the scenes, I sketched them proportionally on paper and scanned into the computer. Initially, we wanted to use the original linearts and only fill in the colors in Adobe Photoshop. But after several attempts, we decide against it as my groupmate is more familiar with the Adobe Illustrator tool. Hence, we switched to it so both of us can work efficiently.

The switch means we will be using vector illustrations as well which was more work than we planned. To compress the work into our limited time frame, my partner will trace and create the vector drawings as I sketched the next scenes on paper. Thus, we were working concurrently.

1. Sketch (scan) / 2. Draft (50% of original size)

3. Final (50% of original size)

As soon as I'm done with the sketches, I started edited the drafts while my groupmate continued with rest of the sketches. I changed the colors to a softer shade as we initially discussed. The outlines are also soften by replacing black with their darker respective colors. I did some tweaking of the vector lines and added the background as well.

With the illustrations finalized, we added text and page no to them and saved them as PDF for printing. Oddly, the colors in the saved PDF appears to have been white-washed and when we tried alternate formats such as PNG and JPG, the vectors lose its sharpness and the edges look rather pixelated. It was an unexpected problem as we thought using CMYK pantone colors will fix such issues. It was after much googling and trial and errors that we found assigning color profiles that looks most like the colors we've used and embedding the ICC profiles while saving the PDF minimizes the color loss.

Sample of Page (50% of original size)

Our final storybook consists of 18 pages, including a cover page, title page, the story and a back cover.