Project: Pre-K children's book
Visual Direction | Character Design | Illustration
A beach-themed children's book project that demonstrates early learning math concepts for Pre-K classes while introducing three mascots. The visual style is designed in soft colors by utilizing watercolor and colored pencils to create a friendly atmosphere, transitioning from simple to more complex compositions.
I was in close communication with the content writer and editor to come up with a suitable visual approach, sketch and illustrate a set of three storybooks, and train and direct the intern to help produce specific assets.
The initial visual exploration follows the idea of carrying on the branding while mocking up a book layout for story writers to get an overall sense of space and look.
After several explorations, we decided to adjust our visual direction to traditional media, which is completely different from our ST Math product, and any visual approach that we have used in the past in order to help create a warmer, softer, friendlier atmosphere for younger kids to read.
Initial style exploration and mascot designs.
Character style exploration in watercolor and colored pencil.
JiJi and Friends' book covers
In this project, we also created additional interactive die-cut elements that kids can play around with, while teachers would be able to tear off assets from the book to further demonstrate the math concepts to students.
Prototype to test out how objects would be placed around the book.
We finished the project by sending the book for printing and pilot testing in classrooms with teachers for testing.
School teachers used the sample book in the classroom.
Program used
Indesign | Illustrator | Photoshop