Tutorial 9 / Lecture 10: Assignment 7 - God Created Fly and Forgot Why (Design Document)

For this week, we continued to work on our storybook. For me, I concentrated on the text and its placement while Jasmine continued to work on the illustrations using Fireworks (a software which she is familiar with). After trying out a few fonts, I decided to use a Sans Serif font because it has rounded edges which may appeal more to kids (a softer look perhaps). Furthermore, serif fonts like Times New Roman seem too "formal". Hence I choose Eras Bold ITC, as below:

I thought it should be bold so that younger kids will have an easier time reading it.

Furthermore, I came up with a small sketch of some mushrooms and a flower to be placed at the bottom right of each text page to serve as a decorative element, otherwise a white text-filled page alone might be too plain for young kids. Here is my sketch:

At the same time, Jasmine came up with the backgrounds of each scene in our story using Fireworks. Here are some examples of how they look like when combined with the text and small sketch (the text is different because her computer did not have my font):

Pages 1-2:

Pages 3-4:

Pages 5-6:

For the placement of the text, I did not follow any grid layout or anything but I tried to make sure it is centralized on the page; I would tweak the text further so that it does not wander too close to the edge of the page, hence controlling attention better. However, Jasmine felt that the text might seem too crammed together, and that the colours of my sketch did not go well with the more luminous tones. Furthermore, there was a faint grey background to my sketch since I scanned them into my computer. I would touch up on these issues but firstly, we showed these images to Siti after the tutorial. She was ok with it except for my small sketch which she felt did not serve any useful purpose. One of our classmates who was in the room at the time suggested that maybe instead of using this sketch, we can use a mushroom image which has page numbers on it, so at least, it has a purpose. Jasmine and I thought it was a great idea, so after I got home, I proceeded to generate a mushroom image as follows (the digit in the middle is the page number):

In addition, I created paragraphs for the text so that it does not look like a big chunk and hence might be easier for kids to read. When combined with Jasmine's illustrations, our yet to be completed work looks like this:

Pages 1-2:

Pages 3-4:

Pages 5-6:

Pages 7-8:


Pages 9-10:


Pages 11-12:

Pages 13-14:


Pages 15-16:


Pages 17-18:


Lecture day has arrived and it was time to show Reddy what we have done so far. Jasmine had to leave earlier, so I stayed back to wait for my turn to present our work to Reddy. Generally, he commented that the text was too heavy and that the illustrations seem rather static in that the expressions and body positions of the boy and the devil were mostly similar from one scene to the next and lacked a dynamic quality which kids are more attracted to. He also felt that we could vary the mushroom image for the page numbers by including other images relevant to our story such as a devil's pitchfork for different pages as kids do not like to see the same image all the time. Regarding our page layout, he thought that it was a "safe" one. As we did not have a print-out of our work then, Reddy requested to see a print-out some other time because it might look different from a computer screen. Hence, after relaying these comments to Jasmine, we continued to improve on our work based on them.