How to Get People to Read More - Full Project

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From our research and the critique explaining it, we were given a topic, associated with our research, that we had to develop a body of work for. The ‘How to…’ question was How to get people to read more.

We began by deciding on a target audience, tone of voice and eventually initial ideas.

Target Audience

-                Children

-                Teenagers

-                Students

-                Adults

Tone of Voice

-                Playful

-                Comic

-                Informal

-                Formal

-                Sophisticated

-                Forceful

-                Advisory

We chose to aim our project at children, as this is where the foundations of reading start and where we all should learn to read. We chose to use a playful and informal tone as this fitted best with the target audience and this is the tone they would most respond to.

From here we pooled together and noted down all of our initial ideas.

Our initial ideas were:

-                Puzzle books

-                Murals

-                Animal illustrations

-                Primary school level

-                Posters

-                Stickers for walls

-                Stickers for children

-                Discourage computer games

-                Mike Perry

From this list we selected our favorites and looked into those further. Our favorite idea was creating murals, however, we also wanted to incorporate stickers, posters and illustrations.

Murals

-                Start a story on a wall

-                Journey

-                Lead from school to library/bookstore

-                Riddles – to find answer you must continue the journey

-                Literary Quotes – must be appropriate

-                ‘Once upon a time…’

-                Existing stories with iconic/well-known imagery

o   Biff & Chip – magic key

o   Hansel & Gretel – bread crumb trail/gingerbread cottage

o   Hungary caterpillar - food

o   The Junglebook – animals

o   Robin Hood

o   Skeleton Bones

o   Rapunzel – hair/tower

o   3 Billy Goats Gruff

o   Alice in Wonderland

o   Gruffalo

o   Where the Wild Things Are

o   Mystic Meg

o   Bearhunt

o   Wizard of Oz – yellow brick road/red slippers/lion/tinman/scarecrow/witch/Emerald City

After a lot of discussion and decision making we settled on producing a load of illustrations to accompany quotes that could be put onto walls around the city, in key areas i.e. the library. We also decided to produce a reward scheme where the child earned a sticker that they could stick on a poster/chart. The final element we wanted to produce was a selection of bookmarks, following our theme, whilst also suggesting other books they might like.

The first thing we did was separate out tasks for each individual member or the group to do. As we have a large group, seven people, it meant we could get a lot done in the short space of time we had.

Kirsty drew the initial sketches of all of our characters. We wanted to keep them as simple as possible as we wanted to break it down into simple colours as that was the aesthetic we wanted.

Anna researched into possible quotes that’s could accompany the illustrations. She collected a range of quotes from sections of popular children’s stories, to quotes by children’s authors.

Danielle then took Kirsty’s drawings and added colour and turned them into vector images, using Adobe Illustrator. This meant that they were really easy to manipulate and resize. She used simple colours that were bright and that looked like the animals.

Emily set about designing and producing a font to be used on all of our work. The font will be used on the poster, the bookmarks, the stickers, the quotes to be put on the walls and our final presentation.

Emily also combined the chosen quotes with the illustrations, using either colours form the illustrations or colours that compliment the colours in the illustration.

Anna produced a selection of possible poster designs keeping them in the same simple style as all of the other work. We decided as a group that it was important for all of our work to fit together aesthetically.

Daisy created a selection of bookmarks, using the characters as the basis for her designs. On the reverse of the bookmarks she produced a checklist of books that the children can tick off. She also designed it so that there was a range of level that the children could progress through once they had ticked off the entire list.

To accompany the bookmarks both Kirsty and Danielle both designed holders that could be placed in school, libraries and bookshops. The holder that we chose to use was Danielle’s due to it functioning correctly.

Melissa produced the sticker chart and sticker to be stuck on the chart. She designed the chart so that it fitted with all of the other deigns, using one of the characters previously designed. Her use of the Giraffe meant that the neck could be used as the chart. The stickers she made all had brief versions of the quotes printed on them so there was a continuity in the work.

My preliminary job was to select locations from around the city where we could place our murals. There were several areas I chose to focus on. The first was large blank spaces where a mural could be placed, without disrupting anything and so it could be seen clearly. The second place I chose to photograph was at suitable locations. For this I looked at the library and Waterstone’s and their surrounding area, as they are the most obvious area for children to get books from.

Once I had photographed and selected the locations I began to manipulate and superimpose the quotes and characters. Some characters were difficult to overlay onto the photograph and make it appear to actually be on the wall. The main difficulty with this was that when the image was added as an overlay its opacity decreased so much it could not be seen. Another problem was getting the perspective correct by distorting the image of the quote and character. I also experimented with some internal spaces to see the affect that would give, providing me with some idea of the appearance on walls indoors.