practice
Students from the All-round Media Maker and Media Design programme have been busy designing children's books as part of Children's Book Week last term.
The stories of these children’s books were written during a story competition by pupils of Sint Jozef primary school in Geldrop. Media design students brought the pupils’ stories to life and designed matching images to the story. Subsequently, students All-round media maker fine-tuned these designs, designed the cover of the booklet and then prepared the booklet for printing in the Makerspace of SintLucas.
Connection with practice
Teacher and initiator of the project Stephanie van Besouw: “Together with Jan (fellow teacher), we are always open to connect and link with practice. The cooperation between the students of All-round media maker and Media Design was also valuable. The collaboration went extremely well and the students really complemented each other. In addition, it was of course extra nice for the students to eventually receive their final work physically in the form the booklet.”
Students Lester Lemmen (Media design) and Mirthe Aarts (All-round media maker) designed images and the booklet for this assignment.
Stories come to life
Lester: “We were tasked with bringing the students’ winning stories to life. We did this by designing images to accompany text by the students. We were allowed to make the designs for a story of our choice. I liked the idea of not immediately choosing a story myself, but rather getting to work with a story that was not immediately chosen. In my case, this was the story: “Bullying is not cool”.
To begin with, Lester started reading the story. “While reading the story, I immediately got images of the text in my head. I then researched different types of styles of illustrations in children’s books. With this inspiration and story of the students in my mind, I started designing my own drawings. First on paper and then I further developed the drawings digitally in Photoshop.” For the collaboration with the All-round media maker students, it was important that the illustrations would be quick and easily adaptable for the book cover design. “This is something I also took into account in my design,” says Lester.
Designing, conceiving and making
From the All-round media maker course, student Mirthe worked on this assignment. “We were provided with the illustrations and designed and made the booklet. Together with Media Design students, we looked at the format, paper type and cover that would best suit the story and illustrations in SintLucas’ Makerspace.”
Valuable collaboration
Mirthe: “The collaboration with Media Design students was really very instructive. I thought the nice thing about the assignment was that you really get to make something they can actually hold and use. “Lester was also enthusiastic about this assignment. “It was a fun and exciting assignment. What made it especially fun was to really bring the story to life and create the world the student had imagined. We really gave the characters a face,” said Lester. Together, the students and teachers also took the booklets to the primary school, which was also a special moment. Lester: “The students were very enthusiastic. One student even said, ‘This is exactly how I imagined it’.”
