This was a GDT 40 assignment for class. 

I was asked by Missy Alpha to create a series of 12-page eBooks highlighting early literacy skills for emerging readers to complete at home between tutoring sessions. She wanted resources especially for her 3–6-year-olds just starting to hold pencils and read/write/learn their alphabets.

I wanted to create a concept that would be both attractive to parents and especially their children to be encouraged to do the included work, but not be so distracting that they are detracted from the goals of each page. I opted to use Kawaii styling and imagery because of its simplistic images and having access to a large enough collection of assets that I could be able to build several eBooks without having to spend too much time illustrating images.

I went with a gender-neutral yellow as the background and kept it to the border of the pages in order to reduce ink usage on home printers. My color scheme was made up of five bold colors used as the tracing medium on each of the pages because dotted lines are strongly discouraged for use with young children. Future eBooks in this collection will have alternating borders from the colors used in the color palette.

Fonts used were chosen based on their similarity to the handwritten alphabet and their ability to be balanced properly on demarcation lines on the page. ABeeZee was used to most of the text, while TheAppleBasic was employed for the words that require tracing by the children.

The pages contain lots of repetition on purpose, since fluency is the ultimate goal, and studies have shown that repetition is key in developing this fluency. “Young children learn words from a variety of situations, including shared storybook reading. A recent study by Horst et al. (2011a) demonstrates that children learned more new words during shared storybook reading if they were read the same stories repeatedly than if they were read different stories that had the same number of target words.” (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00149/full)

All in all, this project was a pleasure to produce, and I look forward to working further with Missy to create the other eBooks in the future.

Moodboard.

Thumbnail drawings.