Cover Designing + Translations
Hi, Everyone!
Happy February! We hope you're keeping yourselves warm and healthy. It's coooold out there! We've been waking up to frost and I have been needing gloves to bike to school with the kids.
We're steadily working on the graphic design. All our illustrations are finished and we have finally settled on a cover design. This was a decision that took a long time as none of us in the team could agree on the background color (should it be light blue? I said no—blue is too “boyish”; should it be yellow? Everybody chose yellow as their second choice; should it be brown?—I said YES, of course, this book is a love letter to brown!—but everybody else thought brown seemed too mature... and so on...) As with all creative processes, we somehow hit upon a solution that everybody was happy with and that met everybody's need. We think you will be happy with this cover!
A lot of other “little” things and decisions are going on as well. Some of these things have been expected: How to layout the translations? How “kid-like” should the fonts be? But some are totally unexpected. The biggest decision so far is making peace with the fact that there just is not enough space for all four languages (English, Binukid, Bisaya, and Filipino) in the book! In an ideal world, every page will accommodate every single illustration and language we want without looking cluttered.
The reality is that the page is only 8”x10”. Having accepted that we can't have it all, now we have to decide which of the four languages we should keep and how best to present them. All these languages are important for different reasons and we have to dig deep and ask ourselves the reason/goal of this project to be able to come up with an answer we can live with. For this reason, we have decided to dispense with the Donors Page and the Glossary Page so we can have more space for the translations.
Instead, we will be creating a website dedicated to the book and this site will have more information about the cultural references we have made in the book as well as the names of our collaborators and donors. IF this is something you, as a donor, feel strongly against, please let us know!!!
As we work on getting the book ready for the printer, we're sure there will be more important (and they're all important!) things that would need to be decided on. We will constantly remind ourselves why we're doing this (FOR THE COMMUNITY!) and hopefully it will help us make good decisions.
Thank you for the love and support, everyone! Stay warm!