GATEWAY TO THE GREAT OUTDOORS STUDENT WORKBOOKS
publication design, 2021
CLIENT: Gateway to the Great Outdoors, non-profit providing STEAM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and outdoor education to low-income schools in St. Louis, Missouri and Chicago, Illinois
AUDIENCE: Children in low-income school districts
GOAL: Make a fun, engaging textbook that’s easy for children to follow along with and understand.
PROCESS: For this project, I worked with Gateway to the Great Outdoors as a part of a team with two other designers. Readability and simplicity were important for this project, so we chose to start with a white background and bold font. For the lesson titles, we wanted to go for a font that was a bit more fun but not something that would be distracting. We settled on a font that had a bubble letter feel, reminiscent of childhood, but still easily read and taken seriously. We also wanted each chapter to be slightly different in a way that teachers or volunteers could easily see that students are in the right section of the workbooks as they walk around the classroom. To do this, we added the colored bar at the top of each page that teachers could easily identify from afar and we then let this color be prominent in other parts of the chapter to keep a sense of continuity. For better engagement, we focused on the “Work It Out!” and “Express Yourself!” sections of the workbook, using paintbrush strokes behind the section headers to make it just a bit more fun and exciting for younger children. One last important detail we added was to leave plenty of space to write, draw, or show understanding to make this workbook be as engaging as possible and allow students to make it their own.
OUTCOME: Our final layout for the workbooks looked professional and clean and was still appealing to children, allowing for better classroom engagement than the nonprofit’s previous versions of their workbooks.
