How to design double spread for kids?
" Despite their simple storylines and silly soundtracks, designing for kids is serious business. It’s not just taking grown-up content and dumbing it down. In fact, there are many reasons why designing for kids is actually more difficult than designing for adults. "
Why is designing for kids so difficult? The main reason is simple: designers aren’t kids. They’re adults, filled with adult life experiences, adult technology preferences, and loads of adult bias about what they liked growing up.
some examples of kids magazine spreads
I can cook, so do you
I can cook is a series of videos for childred produced by BBC. It is a quick and entertaiment way of how kids can learn to cook some basic recepies. Out task was to take one recipe from this channel and create a double page spread.
I have decided to do Easy Peasy Pizza recipe. I have found this "activity sheet" on BBC website so I had content for my double page spread. Their sheet doesn't look bad, but it is little bit "old-fashioned" so I was aiming to create something more creative, fun, child-like.First I was thinking about making colage of realistic photos and illustrations.
I haven't even finished and I knew this is not "The right idea". One of the thing why I think this would not be successful for kids audience- was the fact it wasn't child-friendly. I mean, it would work for adults but children looking for colors, illustrative style - not "dead fish on the table" . So I started with experimenting with vector elements of various ingredients I needed for my pizza.
I HAVE USED PICTURE STOCK ONLINE- HAVEN'T CREATED ELEMENTS BY MYSELF AS THERE WAS BARELY NO TIME
HERE WE GO, THIS IS WHAT I HAVE CREATED
This is it. First I used "typical Italian" table cloth as my background. I wanted to highlight the connection between Italia, pizza, typical restaurant cloth. What I have found challenging was the legibility of typeface I have founded. I wanted to use something playful, not traditional, something eye-catching for kid's eye. But on top of this background I had feeling like it is barely visible. Also the text itself is quite hard to read for kids. So I have changed the background for something more neutral and the result was something I was aiming for.
I also tried to create some mock-ups so people can have better vision how does it looks in a magazine.
