Children’s Books

I’ve always tried to do some fun personal passion projects between my client work. Over the past few years, children’s books have been a main feature - it allows me to experiment and I love exploring use of typography, colours, illustrations and then ultimately testing my ideas on my own children.

When I first started to pursue my career in graphic design, I completed a short course with Central St Martins online. It was led by Ruth Sykes who basically put me on the journey to where I am now.

One of the tasks she set was to make a book about a journey. We had one week to complete conceptualise, design and produce a physical book. I decided quite quickly that I wanted to make this a book for young children (I had recently become a mum and my son loved books). I settled on the journey being through an airport, having seen how nerve-wracking that was for my son, and creating an interactive fun book to explain the process for first time adventurers.

I wanted to include textures throughout and puzzles to help explain what was going on. I made this prototype person to my son with his favourite toys and included a travel log of the flights he had actually already made. This is what I came up with…

Fast forward a few years, I found myself able to revisit children’s books when studying again, this time for my MA. The first challenge was to reimagine something in a new medium - my children (now three boys) had become obsessed with the game Twister so I decided to try and transform Twister into a book. This was lots of fun and the children still play with it now…

I then tried my hand at writing and hand illustrating a book for children about ants…

Finally, it was time to come full circle and revisit my original airport journey book.

However, we now lived in a different world. A post pandemic world. Travel was starting to reopen but many children had never flown before or could not remember a time when they did. I saw a greater need for my book and decided to develop it further.

It became the first in a proposed series of booked called “Junior Journeys”, designed to make daunting experiences for children easier, and even, fun! The below video shows a working prototype of my interactive children’s book, “Airport Adventures”.

How the hypothetical series might look…

I’m looking forward to experimenting more in the future with children’s books. Even if it’s just for my own children, it’s worth it to see their smiles.