Friends Magazine
Designing for the award-winning children’s compilation magazine, Friends.
For this role, I combined typography and illustration to create captivating and educational content for children. Additionally, I am proficient in writing and proofreading stories that are ready for print. During my time on this magazine, I managed multiple projects simultaneously, each requiring a distinct style guide. This experience honed my ability to comprehend and effectively edit photographs, proofread various pieces of work, and ensure timely approvals in accordance with strict print deadlines. The following are some examples of published pages I designed and characters I had the privilege to work with.
Activities
The magazine primarily featured engaging and educational activity spreads, meticulously crafted to assist parents in fostering their child’s cognitive and social development. In line with our commitment to promoting sustainability, we incorporated a monthly gift on the magazine, which would be utilised within the pages. This innovative approach allowed children to actively engage with the content, revisit the magazines repeatedly, and derive multiple benefits from each issue.
A pagination ensured the absence of any duplication of activities, guaranteeing that each magazine contained a diverse range of engaging pages, including games, crafts, recipes, competitions, mazes, colouring pages, and cut-outs.
Friendlings
Each edition of Friends includes a “Friendlings” page that encourages children to draw their favourite characters and submit them to Redan. Furthermore, there is a section that showcases previous submissions. Each child whose artwork is featured receives the prize displayed at the top of the left-hand page.
On the right-hand side is a poll where children can also submit their top three favourite characters that are featured in the issue. I then compile this information into an Excel document to determine which characters should continue to be featured in the magazine.
Workbooks
As part of the magazines ‘Fun to Learn’ scheme, we included educational workbooks that included fun activities and stickers for kids. Every issue includes different branded characters and sub-titles such as Count, Letters, Sort, Colour, Solve, Sound and Look.
These workbooks focus on Phase One within the Communication, Language and Literacy area of learning in the Early Years Foundation Stage. In particular, it will support linking sounds and letters in order in which they occur in words, and naming and sounding the letters of the alphabet. It also draws on and promotes other areas of learning described in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), particularly Personal, Social and Emotional Development and Creative Development, where, for example, the dot and dash method plays a key part in developing children’s language.
These workbook are aimed to be adult-led and have instructions on how adults can help their child understand and learn from the activities. The activities in Phase One are intended to teach young children important basic elements of the Letters and Sounds programme such as oral segmenting and the blending of familiar words.
Stickers
This is the sticker sheet that accompanied the magazine for the aforementioned workbook. As you can observe, the entire lower half of the sheet is dedicated to the workbook, while the upper section is divided into three sections; an activity page on the left, a sticker story on the right, and a Friendlings poll on the far right. For the workbook, the child is awarded a “I’ve finished my workbook!” sticker upon completing all their activities. The red lines detailed around each sticker serve as guides for the cutter during printing, although they are typically not visible once the stickers are printed.
Bedtime Tales
The following are some examples of my Bedtime Tales, a collaborative project with Anderson Press to showcase some of their early-learning stories. These designs are particularly noteworthy because they deviate from the typical layout of the magazine and encourage parents to read to their children during bedtime. Redan requested a basic layout for these stories, so I had to take on both the roles of editor and designer to fit what would normally be a multi-page book with illustrations into a two-page spread with a cohesive narrative structure.
Strip Stories
The strip stories are composed of three pages and can be either sticker activities or purely illustration/ textual. We generally utilised the more popular characters from the polls for these stories, as children are more inclined to follow the narrative if it features their favourite characters. Another sotry template includes the Rebus stories. These are stories that incorporate images within the text, prompting the children to fill in the gaps by interpreting the images’ meaning.
