Family and Friends/Plants/ Key Concepts

Family and Friends/Relationships/ Key Concepts

Having decided to go ahead with doing a re-design of the EVS books and an accompanying teacher’s guide, I’ve started the task of re-arranging the so-called  ‘Syllabus Web’ to bring forth the relationships it tries to highlight.

Vintage Flash Cards

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Absolutely beautiful vintage flash cards and their packaging from A Collection A Day 2010.

Teacher’s Guide, anyone?

Twelve out of first fifteen pages in the EVS book by NCERT for Class III have indications for teachers at the bottom. Isn’t that a good enough sign that there is need for a Teacher’s Guide to go with the text book?

Challenges in designing an Informative Book for Children

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Amit and Anita Vachharajani presented a paper titled ‘Amazing India – A State-by-State Guide Challenges in designing an informative a book for children’ at the Designing for Children seminar at Industrial Design Center at IIT, Mumbai. Their book Amazing India– a State-by-State Guide makes an attempt to interest children into the diversity in India.

The abstract of the paper reads,

“In this paper we talk about the challenges we faced while writing, illustrating and designing a pictorial book on India for children. We talk about the kind of research we did, the illustration issues we faced, and the challenge of creating a layout that would accommodate varied elements. Linked to all of this was the very real challenge of presenting information on India that projects it not as a monolithic whole, but as a kaleidoscopic and prismatic entity – in other words, as ‘Amazing India’.”

Their paper outlines the advantages of good realistic illustration, and how they save the need of detailed textual descriptions which might not be as evocative in the first place.

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The paper also tackles issues of layout in their book – how to fit so much information and visuals in a fixed format.

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All the images in this post are from the paper itself, and the full paper can be downloaded here.

The Publisher’s Point of View

The meeting with the publisher threw up some interesting points, the Editor I met said a lot of right things, I just couldn’t help but wonder if they were all being implemented and if they were, then was it in the right spirit,

1. He said that when children’s books were illustrated, great attention had to be paid if people of different religions had to be represented, and a balance be maintained between the number of boys and girl shown and the activities they were engaged in.

What one could sense immediately was that this task was being seen as an unnecessary burden. That is certainly not the only way to go about this and I’ll write about a case study on this very soon.

2. As far as typography was concerned, he said that they always go with sans serif typefaces as opposed to serif designs. He laid stress on using typefaces that were not too stylized, and typefaces that were friendly. As well as typefaces that were set on a larger point size.

And yet, the books he showed me mostly used Avant Garde which is sans serif no doubt but, it is so angular and so far away from being friendly and child-like.

I really wanted to meet the illustrators at office but that ended up being not possible because they don’t have permanent positions at the office. I did get to see their work and asked the Editor about their modus operandi. He said that they were given a whole bunch of textbooks from other publishers for reference along with the manuscripts of the book, and that became their starting point. The illustrators they employ are usually graduates from the college of art.

Having said all of this, my primary  point of concern is that something about the whole process is amiss. There seems to be no cohesion between the content and the appearance of these textbooks. There seems to be no vision that binds the books together.

Why schools kill creativity?

Ken Robinson makes a point when he says that education universities across the world just work at churning out university professors. Almost all education systems across the world seem to have an implicit hiearchy with math and science being at the top and humanities studies with the arts being way down at the bottom of any curriculum. Why this bias? He says arbitrary academic inflation driven by competition tends to kills creativity at the root. Schools, rather than nurturing creativity systematically subdue it as it introduces the child into the rat race.

Of Labs and Exams Gone Wrong

I met with a History teacher, Mrs. Gulati from a large private school in Delhi to understand how labs are being used in the school.

Now, this school not only has the basic Physics/Chemistry/Biology labs for advanced students but also Science, Social Science, Mathematics and Foreign Language labs for younger students. Of the labs, she said that they were rooms that were used every once in a while to do project work. Students would bring parts of the project they were doing to the lab and assemble it there. Besides that, the lab was used as an examination hall.

I spoke to her about the National Curriculum Framework, and she was extremely disillusioned by the whole thing. She said that the NCERT was more concerned with big words rather than with the ground realities. I asked her if she had had a chance to read the booklets herself and she said no. She did go through them since I was carrying them with me but even after that her disillusionment stayed strong. She said that NCERT’s pressure to put everything in points was driving the students to a point that they only want to know the points and get it over with, they have absolutely no interest in the subjects themselves. Mrs. Gulati also told me that with the new NCERT directives in place, the grammar and writing skills sections of the English exam papers were also multiple choice questions. Even I was quite appalled by that!

Her disillusionment in the system is not founded in nothing. She pointed me to this. The CBSE just made a huge goof-up by having the same exam paper repeated in separate schools on different dates.

“The Central Board for Secondary Examination ( CBSE)’ s plan to ensure uniformity in Class IX examinations across all affiliated schools has led to a major blunder. Its question papers are already out, with many schools yet to conduct the exams. Blame it on the CBSE’s flawed planning, the paper was leaked without any deliberate effort. Nor was any fraudster behind the leak. In its attempt to implement the much- talked about grading system for classes IX and X, the CBSE needed to ensure that the level of exams conducted across various schools conformed to a similar standard. To do that, the board set its own question papers for Class IX, which were sent to schools. The schools would then conduct their exams and mark the answers according to CBSE guidelines.

The board said in a bid to ensure that the same question papers were not repeated, around eight sets of question papers were made for each subject. These were sent in CDs to different schools, with each school having its own set number. While the scheme seemed brilliant in theory, a critical factor was ignored by the board babus — that schools held exams on different dates.”

from ‘CBSE in a spot after Class IX exam goof’ by Amandeep Shukla, Mail Today, March 4, 2010

CBSE chairperson Vineet Joshi had nothing more to say except that he will try to verify how this happened.

Typography for Children: the Basics

Ilene Strizver’s article Typography for Children outlines some basics for type set for children. According  to the article, to maintain text legibility for children, designers must keep the following in mind while selecting a typeface,

1. Look for a warm, friendly design with simple, generous letter shapes.

2. The counters (the enclosed shapes within characters) should be rounded and open, not angular or rectangular.

3. Avoid non-traditional letterforms.

4. Typefaces with larger x-heights are generally easier to read than those with short x-heights, and this is especially true for children.

5. For very young readers, select designs with one-story ‘a’s and ‘g’s (also called infant characters).

6. Avoid condensed or expanded typefaces that might make letter recognition difficult.

7. Select a book or medium weight not a bold or hairline weight.

8. If you plan to use italics, make sure they too are easy-to-read, and not overly condensed or stylized.

With these guidelines, she suggests four typefaces that can be used for children – Sassoon Primary, which is a sans serif design and Bembo Schoolbook, Plantin Schoolbook, as well as Gill Schoolbook, which are serif designs.

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To make the text more readable, she recommends that,

1. The text is set large (14 to 24 point depending on the typeface and age of the reader) and with very generous leading (4 to 6 points).

2. Keep line lengths short, and don’t put too much text on a page.

3. Make sure there is ample contrast between the type and the background.

4. When setting more than one paragraph on a page, consider using line-spaces instead of indents to separate paragraphs. This gives the text and the reader a visual break.

Visual Content in Textbooks

Research into the visual content of textbooks was something I had not actively started till very recently. And now that I have, I realize it interests me a great deal. I’ve written about it here and here, and I felt that it was time to give some structure to this research as I do it. The reason for this sudden inclination towards structuring is that I feel that I have lesser and lesser time to document my research.

The way I intend to go about the research in this area is dividing it into three parts-

a. Typography

b. Illustrations

c. Layout

and then fill in any other blanks that get left out.