January–November 2013

— book design
— illustration

— typesetting

There are not many books for children in Rusyn language. There are quite a few actually, and Rusyn children often miss an opportunity to explore the beauty of the tongue when growing up. My mother had decided to change that and started writing poems for children two years ago. Poems that reveal the life of many animals confront the reader with colloquial as well as with a rare use of language, both built on author's lifelong experience.

To illustrate and design a book for children has always been my dream project to work on. At the beginning of 2013, when the idea of publishing the book became more solid, I started working on investigating the visual language of illustrations. I drew a few options and laid the work off to let the idea ripen.

I got back to working on the project in August, figuring out the solutions to design constraints (such as intended use, budget, and schedule). A decision on book size and the binding was based on expected interaction with the book, size and structure of poems, and, of course, printing budget. Book size, in return, influenced the layout of the poems and the illustrations.

I was expecting the illustrations to be the most time-consuming part of the project (there was 28 illustrations + cover waiting to get born). Therefore I was finding out how to schedule the work to it on time and worth printing. I did two things to get the job done. First, I have set up visual language and color palette to limit the variables that could lengthen the creative process. Second, I was working on illustrations in iterations. I have sketched the illustration for each poem, scanned it and roughly traced it. In that very moment, I saw a lot of work ahead of me, rather difficult to estimate whether it will be manageable until the deadline. That's why I have decided to set a minimum printable version for each illustration and create a backlog of other details I could work on when I will have extra time. It paid off, as I saw the first results very quickly (which was satisfying) and ended up with a lot of time to fine-tune each illustration. Such iterations allowed to maintain and evolve the visual language across illustrations evenly. And when I sent the files to the print shop in November, I had a warm feeling that this will be a book that children will love.

client — tota agentura

author — Ľudmila Šandalová

illustration & book design — Braňo Šandala

The book is available at kompot.sk