This university project did not have a brief, instead as a student I created the brief and set objectives that I would like to achieve. I focued on visual communications and how we can communicate through illustrations. I was inspired by the Silent Book Contest, which is an international contest that hosts and publishes the largest number of silent books. Silent books showcase the universal power of visual as a message can be communicated through design choices that influence our understanding such as colour and form.
Flow
The silent book follows the story of a kite that gets adrift from its home and goes on a journey to find a new home. The message focuses on the need to go with the flow and stop resisting it in order to find a better place.
This message is very close to me and I wanted to represent it through a kite because kites are made to be blown by air and have no control over their direction, similar to the true human nature where we should go with the forces of the universe, yet we always resist and fear that.
Kite movement study
The Kite
Communicating emotions through a kite relied on having expressive forms and effective lines of movement which would represent the different states of the kite. I have done a movement study to explore how the different lines of motion relate to feelings.
Human Characters
Other characters that appear in the story are human. I wanted to take this opportunity to explore character design in both conventional (human) and unconventional (kite/object) ways. The human characters are siblings who share common traits. Thus, I aimed to work on designing the main boy character and how his form would change with movement, facial expressions, and different angles. This would then determine the overall illustration style for the entire set of characters.
Character development
Set of characters
Cover Design
This project has not only focused on illustration and design, it was also required to understand storytelling and specifically visual storytelling. Developing storyboards and presenting them to different people to determine their effectiveness has helped in refining and coming up with the final storyboard design.
Preliminary Pages
During the process of designing the preliminary pages for Flow, I thought about what parts of the story I wanted to highlight without giving away the plot. The aim was to have an intriguing visual that would encourage the reader to flip to the first page of the story whilst including the necessary publishing information.
