In April 2016, long time client Experience Travel Group, turned to us for help with one of their projects. Every year they bring in many tourists from Europe to visit Sri Lanka, which are mainly families. They wanted to create a more personalized and exciting experience for the gift pack offered to families with kids under the age of 8. This gift pack included an intriguing product, a kid’s storybook written by a well-loved author, Sybil Wettasinghe. While the storybooks included in the pack were exciting, we suggested a custom designed book with a whole new storyline that made the trip more memorable and portrayed the idea of an amazing, magical island.
The plot and the concept
Once our client agreed to our idea, we immediately conducted research into Sri Lankan folklore as our intentions were to create a new story that bought back fond memories of the traveller’s Sri Lankan visit, deliver a good and fun message whilst simultaneously giving them an insight to Sri Lankan culture and values.
During our journey to find inspiration for our new story, we came across a well-known Lankan folklore commonly known as පොළවේ නිධානේ (Treasure in the Earth). Although it isn’t humourous, it portrayed good values that can be implied to modern life.
The story is about three lazy brothers who learn a valuable life lesson by giving up their laziness and become successful farmers. Based in a context of a rural village in Sri Lanka, this story combines the magical richness of the soil and the ground beneath us. This is something that will resonate with the visitors, specially kids, visiting the country as they would experience some of the settings described in the story. Upon client approval for the story, we set out to develop it into a book.
Story and composition
Post initial storyboarding, we wrote our copy for each page which was based on visuals rather than text. The story and the project developed mainly based on the visual story and the copy was adapted to fit the ideas.
We wanted to have amusing frames and layouts that would get children’s curious minds to work. The idea of simple and dumbed down visuals were not at all entertaining.
Style
One of the unique features of the book is that we wanted to make it a lasting experience for the kids, therefore we choose a style with a higher level of detail and wherever the story and flow permitted we added small details into the spreads, providing children with the amusement of going through a very colourful journey even if they do not understand the story entirely.
Characters
From a marketing point of view, this is a great promotional material since it is developed from scratch to make a better impression about the client in their customer’s mind. It stands out from typical advertising materials that are popular among similar promotional campaigns.
Texts and fonts
We chose to use serif typefaces first and then decided to go with rather conventional approach of using a handwritten font. The text was included with a simple frame to avoid disturbing the main content structure.
What’s next?
We have significant updates and changes planned for the book, making it more interesting and better in every possible way, and are planning to publish this book in Sinhala, Tamil and English. If you are interested please sign up to our newsletter and we’ll keep you posted.
Story, art direction and coloring by Nadun ‘Irupa’ Edirisinghe / Illustrations by Dhanushka / Printing by R R Industries
