The cover and interior I designed for a reprinting of the textbook Speaking Out was selected over ten other designers
When I first started working on Speaking Out, my main focus was to make the redesign more user-friendly. The original design had large pages, small text, confusing page numbering, and a little too much white space. There were very few images. Those that were provided from the original layout were in an art style that didn’t fit with the redesign I imagined, so I went to Flickr and scoured the Creative Commons for pictures of Sierra Leone. I wanted to add both visual interest to the pages and give students some context for the information they were reading so they were more engaged with the text.
Most of the added images in the book come from Flickr, with the exception of two maps. I recreated the Tracing the Trail of Diamonds diagram in Adobe InDesign because I thought the old diagram didn’t communicate its information as best as it could. The map of North Africa was drawn in Adobe Illustrator. I couldn’t find a map of the area that was both free and as high quality as I wanted, so I created one myself.
After reading the text and supplementing it with as many free and relevant images as I could find, my next goal was to rearrange the content in a way that made more sense for the reader. The book is split into four sections that each have around five lessons. In the original design, the lesson plans were all grouped together at the beginning of each section and followed by all the section’s handouts. There was no labeling for which handouts went with which lessons. It made more sense to me that the relevant handouts should be grouped directly after the lesson plan that calls for them, as a student would presumably be moving from lesson to lesson linearly and would prefer not to flip through five lesson plan descriptions before he or she got to the handout needed. The new design regroups the materials in a more intuitive way.
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Tracing the Trail of Diamonds—New
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Tracing the Trail of Diamonds—Old
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Cover—New
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Cover—Old
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Map of North Africa
