Visual Book Documentation — a book about aphasia
The task for the final project was to create a visual book using effective typography and grids, appropriate illustrations, and a fitting color palette and visual style. I decided to create a book to be read by parents to their young children, helping the child understand aphasia (brain damage that causes language deficits) that a friend or family member may be afflicted by.
References
Using children’s books that I enjoyed as a kid as reference, I tried to identify 1. how I could capture and keep a toddler’s attention, and 2. how I could use this to communicate the aphasia information. Each book has a lot of different colors and big visuals to keep the child entertained. In addition, the ratio of writing-to-illustration is very small. Given my lack of background in illustration and my time constraints, I knew I couldn’t make each spread as expressive as these books. However, I did my best to keep the small text-to-visual ratio in mind, and I chose colors and a visual style that might capture a child’s attention.
Early Iterations
Aphasias can be categorized in different ways, so I was initially going to create icons to classify each aphasia. The far left image shows some examples of those such icons in the top left corner. I was also going to try and show where the damage in the brain was for that specific aphasia.
I developed the middle page after deciding that icons and a graphic of the brain went into too much detail for a children’s book. Here, I am developing the style I wanted to write in. Again, the book is meant to be read by an adult but understood by a child. This means that the text has to have a balance of information and body copy that’s “easy to chew”.
The rightmost page gives an example of how I would help the parent read, because some the names of aphasias are hard to say. It also has a box that was meant to be filled by an illustration. Lastly, I began to develop a character for each aphasia, a concept that I carried out until the end.
Every page has body text in Mrs. Eaves, and almost immediately I developed a 4 column grid structure. Mrs. Eaves is a really approachable and readable typeface, so using this and a matching grid structure would make the book pleasant to read and look at.
This is an example of the writing that I was trying to use. It’s very colloquial so that it offers the child language that they are used to seeing. I understand that aphasia might be a hard concept to grasp for a young child, so I want the child to be introduced via language that they hear all the time (and thus, language that is easy to understand).
Character and Story Development
I explored different illustration and character styles, hoping to find one that would look good and be appropriate for my book. I first sketched to get an idea of whether I wanted angled or rounded corners, a certain type of eye, etc. I then moved to Procreate, leaning towards a “chalk” pen to give it the feeling of school.
As the above children’s books are stories, I wanted to develop stories for each of the characters. They would not be interwoven, but they would give each character a setting and make them more believable for young kids.
At this point in time, I was asked how I would code each character as having that aphasia. I thought it best if I just used the letters as characters to signify their association with that aphasia. Therefore, I ditched the chalk drawings in favor of a more refined character design, consisting of characters made out of letters of different fonts.
Each character is in a font that’s characteristic of the aphasia. For example, conduction aphasia’s character (Calhoun) is made with a “C” from the Rockwell typeface. Conduction aphasia is characterized by poor repetition, so I chose a font that had oddities that were hard to repeat from memory.
Because these characters are a little less traditional, I decided not to give them backstories or idiosyncrasies via stories. Instead, I decided to focus on what made each aphasia unique and how to communicate with someone with each aphasia.
Combining Illustrations and Typography
I tried using linking the styled characters as markers of the aphasias themselves and linking them to a featureless character (bottom right). This introduced a lot of hard visual coding problems, so I said no to that idea pretty quickly.
The pages here have 3 columns to facilitate the falling groups of copy that are evident in the top couple pages. I also played with making the characters bigger and trying to link the aphasia more closely to the character on each page.
Final Product
I changed the book to be 6 inches by 6 inches, and gave each page’s title, character, and body copy it’s own spot. The final book is also printed on yellowed and speckled paper that is almost construction paper-like in quality. This gives the book a character that is indicative of a children’s book, and it makes the colors more similar to each other and the book more cohesive.
The book is informative and helpful for kids who don’t know how to communicate with people who have aphasia. It also maintains the colloquial language while still making sure the children know the true names of the aphasias.
Given more time, I would like to make the introduction and conclusion spreads more like the specific aphasia spreads. I would also have played around with scale. I think my characters deserve more space on the page than what they take up now.
