Children's Illustration Brief - "A - Z"

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Children's Illustration Brief - "A-Z [Of When I Grow Up I Want To Be]"

BRIEF:

The brief required you to use the theme A-Z as the basis for your illustrations.

CONCEPT:

I chose to direct my visual style towards children - simple and linear with a slight cutesy, contemporary feel. I felt that this would also appeal to parents purchasing the booklet on the child's behalf.

My idea was to base my A-Z around "When I grow up I want to be", but to depict it through a child's imagination/dress up to give it an edge and create humour.

During market research I took inspiration from various imaginative career aspirations from primary school aged children. I then asked children from my local school to handwrite these by their sound in order to attain child-like phonetic spelling errors to increase authenticity.

Using different children allowed me to receive a variety of handwriting styles which lent well to appearing as though each career was a different child's aspiration.

As the brief required full colour examples, I used pencil crayon to reflect a medium both commonly used by children and suitably pigmented; providing vivid colours appropriate to the demographic.

I restricted the colour palette to predominantly pastel shades as not to be garish, but bright enough to be eye-catching and playful.

For my finals, I produced an A5 sized saddle-stitched booklet that I felt was most appropriate to display my illustrations.

On the reverse cover I added a humourous, anonymous quote that I felt complimented the personality of my work.

For the cover I used a mixture of hand-drawn type that I felt worked well as part of the imagery, and Brain Flower typeface, which was organic and subtle enough as not to detract from my imagery whilst adding structure.

I also showed how the illustrations could be further utilised, applied to homeware such as mugs.