Exercise - Working for Children

In my research for compiling examples of imagery for children I have focused on book covers. I discovered several excellent resources.

Foremost was the Random House publishers web site, where a vast collection of children's book titles were helpfully divided in to age ranges that more or less reflected that required by the exercise brief.

I found reference material on sites both UK and US based. From behance.net and their Yo Yo Phonics project illustrations. To several blogs containing pre reader and kindergarten material. Also a Guardian newspaper online article on setting up a childrens home library, also divided by age range.

On the whole I would say that age ranging was a bit of a moveable feast at the lower end the differences between Pre-reader and pre-school were not easily defined, indeed some books assigned to the 5 - 7 category were also described as ideal for first readers. I suspect that the differences in ability between the top and lower ages in each range could potentially be quite big, so in imagery design terms this amounts to a deal of flexibility in approach and was sometimes reflected by quite intricate designs in an age bracket where simple imagery seemed to be standard

Any way moving right along....here are my collections for each group

For the sake of this exercise I have redefined the starting group to include Pre-reader with pre-school

My early reader collection.

It is difficult to make observations on a small selection without seeming to generalise but there does appear to be a tendency to use blue in the design, particularly in the younger age ranges also where exotic animals are used for the this range as the target age goes up the animals used seem to be more domestic,there are also some good examples of the different ways text is used in the design, from extending from the imagery as in the case of Mister Magnolia to Contrasting with it like Mrs Armitage on Wheels. I also noted that text embellishment doesn't start appearing untill the early reader designs.

And in the 7 - 9 category..

For older age groups I visited the goodreads.com site, Young adult and middle grade (9 - 12yrs)section.

the leap in sophistication of design is evident and what is going on can, perhaps, best be described here: http://writeforkids.org/2014/01/the-difference-between-middle-grade-young-adult/ although specific about the last age range I feel that it also has implications, in general terms, for the changes in design considerations between each group

My choice groups to focus on are; Early and Established readers. Initially my choice of word to explore was Growing. Let brainstorming commence

The giraffe quickly sprang to mind as my animal of choice as the difference between a young animal and an adult is nicely exaggerated.

Perhaps reaching up for something that is currently out of reach...

I started to think the scope of the word 'Growing, was limited and so decided to have a look at another. Combining my thoughts and research done so far, I persevered with the giraffe idea. My thinking being that an image of a young giraffe peering over a 'hedge' for the first time could be ascribed to the word Discovery

I will use this idea for my early reader design and was already exploring an idea based on a horse lifting something to reveal a new world of bugs etc underneath

I chose to keep the Giraffe design for the early reader simple and use blocks of colour. I decided that for speed and flexibility that I would look to the Procreate painting App on my Ipad

Importing my giraffes head line drawing I used an airbrush tool to apply colour. I had trouble positioning the Giraffe to give the proportions of colour I was after, which created a curious effect of spray over sharpe edges within the design.

I took the same approach for my second design but in keeping with my earlier observations created more of a situation in the design.

And given the Procreate treatment