Initial Concepts and Roughs

I decided to create some painted textures and photograph different fabrics, as primary resource material I could use when putting my pages together or creating illustrations. I also roughly sketched some food items to then be coloured digitally. Sketchy lines reflect child-like tendencies to draw roughly and colour outside of the lines. I experimented with many different hand-render styles by using materials like crayons, charcoal, oil pastels, felt pens, oil paint, water colour paint, and fabric collage.

I then started to experiment with art styles. Here I cut out sections of my oil paintings in the shape of carrot, potato and an apple, inspired by the paint textures seen in 'The Hungry Caterpillar'.

Here I coloured in my food sketches in photoshop, painting outside the lines to give a messy sketchy appearance, similar to a childs drawing. 

I also experimented with photographic cut outs and adding personality to the food ie creating characters by adding faces, expressions, arms etc. 

I also looked at adding photographic and illustrative elements together. Here I combined my paint texture, photograph, typography and digitally created shapes and colours. 

Moreover, I began to look at page layout and sketched some quick thumbnails to show different possibilities of how the double page spreads could look.

Illustrators & Art Style Research

I started looking a bit more into children's books and illustrations / products aimed at children, in particular cookbooks and things to do with food. Firstly I looked through 'The 10 best children's cookbooks' put together by The Independent;
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/the-10-best-childrens-cookbooks-8588949.html

I noticed the varying art styles and noted what I though worked well and what didn't. I liked the books that used all illustration (such as 'Pretend Soup), as well as all photography (such as 'The Usborne Cookbook for Children) for their front covers. Some even use both illustrations and photography (Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes) which I think works well as the illustrations appeal to children and the photographs can make clearer instructions of what needs to be done for the recipe. The themed cookbooks also work well (The Moomins and Star Wars for example) as the children can relate to the characters they know and love.

I have also seen food being turned into characters in many children's books, going back to the idea of the face being important in what engages the child to relate to the character (as seen in the BBC TV programme 'Picture Book'). I own some stationary products from the shop 'Paperchase' which feature cute food characters with faces and thought this style might be appealing to children, particularly girls.

Some notable children's books and illustrators -

David McKee (Elmer)

Brightly coloured character and background, almost camouflaged, immediately creating a game for the child to find Elmer on the first page 

Mick Inkpen (Kipper)

Anthropomorphic dog as main character, bright colours, soft textures, a book series I enjoyed as a child. 

Lauren Child (Charlie and Lola)

Illustrations often involve mixed media and collage, incorporating different patterns and textures juxtaposed with sketchy hand drawn-styled characters.

Main Brief

Childrens Book Design Brief 2014

Clients: ‘Local Food Lunches’ and Partners (UW Sustainability, The Pumphouse Environment Centre, Malvern Hills Food Alliance and WildfoodUK.co.uk).

Title: The Family Sustainable Cookbook


Looking through the main brief, I selected some key words and phrases I felt important to remember when designing my cook book -


"Cooking with simple, healthy, seasonal ingredients of the like you'll find on your local highstreet (or region/countryside)

Children are loosing touch with where their food comes from.

For many busy families cheap supermarket food, fatty and sugar-ridden ready meals and convenience foods often form the majority of the weekly diet.

Cook simple,quick,healthy and cost-effective alternatives.

Food often cheaper found on the local highstreets, rather than supermarkets. 

Shopping locally can be 'win-win': purchasing local products can help make for a more sustainable lifestyle, benefit your local economy by bringing in money and helping rejuvenate your highstreet - and by association, your local communities.

This book will aim to re-engage children and families with good, healthy, seasonal foods by getting children to cook (with adult supervision) simple recipes via visually dynamic spreads with specific focuses (via our partners)

There is one main age group category aimed at (assume with adult supervision) - 8yrs upwards.

Produce - 1 front cover (front, spine and back) + 2 internal double page spreads."

Added Features

Notes from lecture.

How children learn? Are they a visual, kinetic or auditory learner?

Young children - 5 senses - taste, touch, sight, sound and smell.
Engage in more than 1 of these, more likely to pick up book and learn.
Books vs technology (tablets, phones) - how to make a book stand out - added features

3 Approaches to aiding/improving child's learning - Building on existing knowledge (juxtapose 1 reference they understand to one the don't) Transferring knowledge (Applying learned knowledge to real life situations) and Memory Strategies (repetition + rhyme).

Book Design Added Features Examples:
Buttons, Wheels, Move-able parts, Animations, Puppet Toys, Textures (different fabrics, paint brush textures), Rhythm (avatar/character featured on every page or chronological story), Stickers, Crayons, Wipe Clean boards/Blackboards, Added electronics Lights + Sounds, Specialized inks, Scratch Sniff Smell, Die Cuts, Flaps, Fold outs, Pop-ups.

Too many added features can over-complicate things.

Session task - quick analysis of 2 books with added features -

Calm Down, Boris
Added content is a plush puppet that is stuck through the middle of the book, so it is featured on every page. It is brightly coloured and furry so encourages the children to stroke and engage in play with the character. The story features the character going to different places, and the puppet can be used by both parent and child. The words encourage interaction with the puppet - ‘let’s stroke his fur to make him feel better.’ 
Touch is the main sense used for this book due to the fluffy texture of the puppet. We think this is an appropriate way to present the content as the content always refer to the texture ‘brush his hair’ ‘tickly kisses’. Other senses include sight as the pages are quite stylized and detailed with others objects and characters to find. The main plush puppet is only the mouth part of the character, his eyes, arms and legs are illustrated so he has different expressions and body language on each page. The book can be considered a toy as well as book so children can enjoy it over and over. 

Fantastic Four Pop-Up
Unique shape of book, shiny printed sections of front cover and pages. Follows format of a comic book but with pop-ups. Every page has a pop-up, pull-out or flap which would entertain the children for longer and they can play around with the book more. Senses that have been stimulated are touch and sight. The shiny sections, flaps and pop ups can be touched and the pop-ups are engaging to look at also. The pages are quite detailed with lots of image and text which is also visually engaging. We think the pop-ups are appealing to a younger audience and are presented well, but it is very text heavy and the text is quite small so this might not be suitable for the younger children. We also think that the pop-ups are delicate so again might not be suitable for a younger child unless it is read with an adult. 



Cookbooks with added features - examples

First one features pages where children can draw on and write their own recipes, second one comes with a free apron that the child can wear whilst cooking and using the book.

My own experimentation and thoughts with added features (from sketchbook)-

Week 5 Blog Task

'Easy Cheesy Eggy Bread'

I chose to make the 'easy cheesy eggy bread' as it was a simple start and the recipe I would have most enjoyed, plus I feel it would be the most appealing to children due to its simplicity. I made the dish in Ludlow, where I also purchased the ingredients. 

Bread - £1.40 for a loaf from Waltons Bakery.

Cheese - £1 for the block I purchased, also from Waltons bakery, locally supplied.

Butter - £1 from a supermarket.

Chives - £1 from a local green grocer.

Egg - £1 for a box, from Clun farm.

Overall I think it would cost less than £1 per person for this dish as the small amount I used actually made enough for 2 people. It only took about 10 minutes to make this dish, and I think after making it once it would take even less time to complete if I were to do it again. To change or improve the recipe, I could try using different varieties of breads such as wholemeal or flavoured varieties. I could add toppings such as bacon bits or onions and peppers, which may be more appealing to children due to different colours and textures. 

Task 3

Mock up a double page spread for: CBeebies "I Can Cook"

This can be either a story book or reference/information approach to help introduce children aged 5-7 to one of the simple recipes from the CBeebies website.

Made in Photoshop, free clip-art found on google images. I chose a reference/information approach as the target audience are at school age and are coming across info books regularly. I wanted the page to look colourful and detailed to engage the child, but not too much as they are still quite young so a simplistic layout and background isn't too overwhelming. The various cartoons (cow and smiley star) are appealing to children as they can relate to these cartoon characters. The title font is a hand-drawn style so children can recognise and relate to these textures from their own drawing. I kept a balance between text and imagery as if there was just a wall of text it would be boring to children and without the text there would be no task for the children to take part in or no educational purpose/practice reading for them. I added extra information on the top right page to further educate the children on where their food comes from. I used a sans-serif font as it links to the fonts used on the CBeebies website, and fits in with the art style of the modern clip-art pictures. I think my overall design works well, however I think next time I would try hand-rendered style and serif fonts, as this too is appealing and engaging to children as we learned in last weeks lesson. 

Task 2

Appropriate art styles

Information/ Reference title- aimed at 9-11 year olds.

I think that older children would respond well to this very colourful and detailed art-style. The front cover alone is very busy and interesting to look at. The images of the animals are very realistic meaning they are more educational as children will learn to recognize that this is what they look like in real life, as opposed to books aimed at younger children where animals are drawn and coloured in cartoon styles. As the title suggests the book enables the children to go on a 'search' making the book more appealing as they can engage in a 'search' for specific animals by looking through the extremely detailed imagery, similar to a 'Where's Wally' styled game. 

Baby / Toddler - First objects books.

The layout and imagery are very basic and simplistic - easy for a toddler to respond to. It's the sort of book the parents would start reading with their child to help them to learn basic words, then eventually as the child gets older they will be able to read and recognize the imagery by themselves. The use of photographs instead of drawings makes it easier for a young toddler to identify with the objects in real life. The rainbow colours makes the book look more appealing to children as well. 

Picture Book - Aimed at 3-6 year olds.

The Gruffalo's art style is a brightly coloured hand-drawn style, that I think would appeal to 3-6 year olds as they may notice within the texture of the drawing the sort of materials used are similar to how they may draw. The characters are cartoon-ish and the gruffalo/monster looks quite friendly so children of this age wouldn't be afraid of it like that characters in the book are.