Creating a design and Layout for the book “Invloed op je Leven” (Influence on Your Life) was an interesting challenge where I combined the writing and artwork in a manner that would form an engaging self-help book with a friendly and motivating design.

The main parameter was that it had to be suitable for people with low literacy. Designing for such a group of people is challenging since you have to rethink a lot of aspects of your usual design workflow.

1. for starters, you want to use “stable” fonts without serifs that carry their weight on the page. You use big letters and short sentences whilst ensuring a high contrast between the text and the background.

2. Then you work with clear colors and divide the different aspects of your page into clear sections so people have a clear reading order. The aim is to keep the content concise and not to crowd the pages.

3. The books had to contain the Bettery Green color and would have to look playfully and professional. This meant that I used round shapes in combination with the friendly illustration made by artist May-Britt.

Designing the layout for a book in this manner is challenging and pushes your creative ability since the style provides a lot of strict parameters to navigate and creating something that works well for the target audience whilst also looking inviting and not too childish was interesting and pushed my abilities as a designer.

In the end we have a design that is not necessarily extremely creative or beautiful but very functional and serves its purpose well.

The design process involved a lot of user testing with the local community which helped us a lot to create an accessible book that can help many people improve their quality of life. In terms of making a positive impact on society, this project was one of the most fun to work on and very rewarding.

In the end, the book was published and is being successfully sold today! Due to this, I am not able to showcase much of the book content but I am happy to show off some of the designs.