Lakeside Brief- Initial Research

The main aim of this brief is to get children out into the woodland and experience wildlife and getting muddy again. This activity book needs to be informational but at the same time present the idea that being outdoors is actually still as fun as playing inside on games consoles. Bright colours should be used, in my opinion as it is for kids but I think that there needs to be a great deal of colours which relate to the woodland such as brown, greens, blues (for streams/lakes).

I am going to begin my research by looking at the following areas in children's book design:
- Outdoor books for children
- Outdoor Activity books for children
- Activity books for children
- Woodland themes
- Woodland themed books (children or adult)

Outdoor Books:




The above book covers and double page spread all have a theme, although they aren't actually activity books, they are all books which look at the outdoors, whether it is an information book or its a story book. As the activity book that we need to produce is for both boys and girls and also as a learning resource, it would need to be relatively neutral in the colour schemes. The above examples tend to swing one way or the other and aren't really suitable for both genders.

Outdoor Activity Books:





The book covers above tend to be all suitable for children and adults as the adults will probably be the ones helping the children to complete the different tasks.The front covers all have some kind of illustrations on them, whether it is cartoon style, photorealistic images or line drawings of cartoon and photorealistic images. It is a difficult one to decide on as kids like cartoon images and it makes them less daunting but if they are overly whimsical then they children may not see or understand the cartoon in relation to the real life object.

Activity Books (in general):







 
Above shows some images from the inside of activity books for children. I like the idea of having the map outline, I plan on incorporating that into my map which would be on the back page of my activity book.

Woodland Books (Adult and Children):








The above book covers range from being suitable for adults and for children, I wanted to look at a range of book covers for different aged audiences in order to see the different techniques that have been used.


3D Cutout/Print outs:





I have focused on bookmarks as I think this will also encourage the children to read more.


Other Inspiration: