My design choices

Why The Little Prince?

This book came to my mind immediately when this task was presented in class. There are so many layers in this story, and while it pretends to be a kids’ book, it turns out to be philosophical and suitable for people of any age.

The main task was to create a page without using images, which means that the colour and the type were the main instruments of artistic expression.

Choosing typeface

I was inspired by the styling of classic typography, so the anchor font should be a serif one. For the heading, I wanted to find a cursive font that is as close to the feeling of the original heading of the book as possible. I narrowed down my font pairs to the combination of Leckeri and Vollkorn or Grand Hotel and Lora. After applying these typefaces to the real content, I chose the second pair. Grand Hotel cursive looked beautiful for the needed short heading and Lora is a very clean and contemporary serif with lots of variations and weights. More than that, I liked that the letterforms of Lora look lighter in comparison to Vollkorn.

Choosing colour

My first colour choice was a combination of dark midnight blue background and light blue wrapping with bright yellow for headings. After revision, I decided that this palette was too heavy for such a soft text. Darker yellow as a background colour didn't work at all. And I continued the colour search finalizing it with a palette from one of the book covers with an original illustration of the author. I changed the background to a lighter violet-blue and added pastel pink, yellow and green as accent colours.

After choosing the fonts and colours, I created mock-ups with the real content and started marking up and styling the page. While experimenting with responsive design, I had to make some changes to the design, especially to the sizing and proportions of the elements. Even with changes, I still find that creating a visual mock-up is a very helpful and important part of my design process.

You can take a look at my design process on this whimsical page.