Presenting the newest Junior Ranger Booklet (almost)

(from my work blog)
Hi folks!

Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I'm really pleased with how this booklet is turning out. I can't wait until this summer when we can get these activities in the hands of little kids and their families. I wish I could just hide in the VC and watch people's reaction as they discover the new booklets and head outside.

The bad news is that today was our self-imposed deadline to have the Pacific Tree Frog Junior Ranger Activity Booklet completely designed and well, as you'll soon see, it's probably got a few more days of work left on it. I could have stayed up all night to finish this up, but I found the more I rushed the designing process, the less happy I was with the quality of work.

The other good news-- I'm getting faster at this and am able to copy and paste information/design elements between booklets. The second one will be faster than the first and the last one will be done in under an hour. Okay, maybe not.

For the sake of my upcoming role with the RLN Science Communication Workshop, I'm going to have to put these pages on hold until after Dec. 4th. Maybe a little mental break will be good for my creativity.

Other timeline reminder: I'll have the text/content designed by Dec. 18th (when I go home for the holidays), at which point, people can go crazy with the editing. Yes, I know there's some edits that haven't been incorporated yet (Marieke, I haven't put in your latest round just yet), but I wanted you all to get a sense of where this is going:


INSIDE JACKET Okay, this is my FAVORITE design element of the whole book. I think I want this tatooed on my arm or something. There will also be a frog in the lower left corner, welcoming kids to the North Cascades.



I still need to develop graphics for the stamp, badge/certificate, and patch. Anytime you see empty blocks of color, these are just placeholders where illustrations will eventually go.



Okay, this is actually a hard page to lay out. There's still some content that I need to include, but I'm hesitant to add too much information to the map for fear of overloading the viewer (and remember, this booklet is for 3-5 year olds, plus their parents)


I think I'm going to add a ranger hat to the frog.



Okay, this is my second-favorite illustration in the book. I think it's successful because I actually drew it out by hand ahead of time and then worked with a scan on my computer (as opposed to starting and finishing everything on the computer). It's a little bit more loose, but still fits in with the clean graphic style of the other pages. Ah! The little tadpoles are so cute!



(Is the frog closing his eyes or farting?)



Okay, the graphics on this page frustrated me for the longest time, but now I'm happy with the animals on the right and their shading. The shadows help reduce the flatness that sometimes shows up in my graphics. Expect to see more of this.


Some things I like, others need to be fixed. The stylized marmot is from an older project and may rework it. Thoughts? Also, what other animals should I include throughout the maze?


This and the next page have a lot of potential, but because there is so much information (story, side bars, illustrations, connect the dots, graphis within the story, etc), I'm going to have to be smart about the design to avoid a cluttered look. To see how these two pages look side-by-side, I've included the "spreads" at the bottom of this post.



Most of these graphics have been re-used from the Black Bear matching game. I may re-draw them, or I may not. Depends on timing.



This will be reworked so that an illustrated frog sits in the middle and points to a couple of its sensory organs (nose, eyes, hand, ear, or mouth).



Again, another two-page spread. There will be some graphic elements like the inside jacket, as well as totem characters with speech bubbles. Also, human/kid characters need to be included too!





TWO-PAGE SPREADS

Front and back cover need to be designed too. I have some ideas but since these are so important, I really didn't want to rush these illustrations.







Ta-dah!