Conceptualization
Visual style
The visual style of the graphics in “BeeBee’s adventure on earth” stems from the inspiration of orisinal.com. The complexities of objects and elements in real world are simplified in the line work and shape. Taking the trees for instance, they adapt whole round shapes which symbolises the very much simplified world of children. Bushes are almost homogenous to one another, and the shapes are grouped and organised in sets so as to bring across the idea of “simple yet not plain” environment. Much focal points are established at the foregrounds where the characters are. The vector lines are hard and exact, in contrast to the “Gaussian-blurred” backgrounds. The “blurred” backgrounds epitomises the concept of an imaginary world of children which is illusional, sweet and fictional. Some of the background elements like the landscape in a distance and manicured trees are finished with object details so as to add texture to the graphics.
Colour scheme
Colour scheme we chose for the graphics are processed colours mixed in whites. The background colours are close to pastel, while the foreground characters adapted stronger processed colours. Once in a while, we still kept the tonal values conservative and conventional to what the audience would expect of in children’s illustration. We played with different tonal values of blues to depict the shadow areas of the character or object. The colours of foreground objects are kept to two tones when expressing a shadow or dimension, which differs from the background objects, which are rendered with explicit gradation.
Fonts selection
We selected “Good Dog Plain” as the primary typeface of our book. The architecture each letters in the font family adapts random sizes, with each letter probably cutting into the space of another letter. However, the randomness of the letters is coupled with intuitive interplay of spatial values, thus making the font playful and interesting visually. At the cover page, we played with the size of the typeface, fundamentally to highlight the name of the character “BeeBee”, and also to create visual contrast with the abrupt down-play of font-sizes. The letters in this context are graphical elements that bear relationship to one another; their proximics to one another map relationship between one letter and the other. Playing with the proximics, kerning and leading of the typeface here renders them with significance and meaning. The text elements also interact with the graphic of BeeBee at the right hand side of the page. This allows the audience to effectively establish relationship between and text and graphics.
