KUNGFU-RELLA is targeted at children ages 6 - 9. We decided color was a very important factor in creating our storybook thus a WHOLE RANGE OF COLORS have been used. Mainly warm colors are used to attract children's attention. Cool colors are used as background colors to make the contrast between background and foreground.
Color Palette
Page and grid layout of KUNGFU-RELLA
Document Specifications
Print size: 6 x 8 inches, 0.25 bleed
Printing: Double-side, laser jet
Book cover: Soft cover, art card, 250GSM
Other pages: Matt paper, 157GSM
Book Binding: Stapling
Total number of pages: 22 (whole book)
Printing paper: Art paper and glossy paper
Brief Story outline
Our main character, Cinderella is a poor girl who marries the prince. She is not well-liked by the royalty because she is a commoner. She is very determined, eager to learn things and she sincerely loves everyone in the kingdom a lot. Thus, she went on a mission to save the kingdom from a wicked witch with the help of an old wise man, Wisely. She succeeded and was finally accepted by the royalty. They finally live happily ever after.
The wicked witch, who represents an evil character, finally died. This is to show the children that good acts or deeds will always triumph against evil acts or deeds.
Wisely, the old wise man represents an elderly with wisdom and many skills. The illustration of Wisely as a monk shows that he is well-respected by others and possesses great wisdom.
The other characters such as the king, queen and prince play minor roles in this story. The main attention is focused on Cinderella and whether she will accomplish her mission to save the kingdom.
Finally, our morale of the story is a strong will help one to weather through all obstacles.
Enjoy~! :) :)
Problems encountered
The tight schedule was the biggest challenge we faced
The difficulty in coming to a common decision due to everyone’s varying opinions; such as the disagreements regarding the plot
Sourcing for a printing company that is of good quality and within our budget
Deciding on the colours for an optimum colour representation
We have used Illustrator to trace the hand-drawn sketches. However, the quality of the pictures is not up to standard. In the end, we have to trace the sketches again using Flash.
Due to our haste in tracing, we have missed out certain portions of the sketches and we have to re-trace again.
After placing the pictures in Photoshop, we realised that we have forgotten to colour certain parts of the pictures in Illustrator, so we have to re-do the colouring again.
After completing the sketches, we realised that they are not beautiful without a background so we drew the background in Flash.
The background sketches are difficult to combine with the previous foreground pictures. We end up having pixelated pictures after placing them in InDesign using the Photoshop software.
Another error we made was not having our files linked properly so the pictures are pixelated and we could not print our storybook.
Finally, after consulting Ms. Chiang and Mr Alfred, we re-placed the file and re-sized the pictures in Illustrator instead of Photoshop. We also placed all files within the same folder so that there will not be any missing links.
Lessons gained
We learnt to work with a really tight deadline to generate a good story. It is necessary to do a lot of research on our target audience to write a story that is suitable for them, and to conduct clear planning. We have also learnt to plan our time wisely so that all the hiccups we faced in this project could be resolved within the stipulated dateline.
More research should be ideally done on printers and printing shops before printing our artwork because certain printing shops are not able to print the artwork to our desired quality. Moreover this project has given us the opportunity to learn how to use the computer graphics software, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and InDesign in greater depth.
In addition, this project helps us to apply the design principles taught in class such as the colour palette, typography, etc.
Overall, through this project, we have realised the importance of teamwork. By consolidating each and every individual’s strengths, we managed to learn a lot from each other and put our specialities to good use.
