Let's Write: Design Your Own Fonts
"How does this perfect holiday gift tie in to a child's digital life? Once the letters and numbers, labels and scripts are created here, they can be scanned in to provide even more hours of design and animation fun."
Today children are on computers from preschool age. And much of the art and design that children are involved in once they hit their middle elementary school years involves digital means such as photos and photo retouching, PowerPoint presentations and slides, and movies using various video creation and editing software. Does that mean, however, that all opportunity for hand wrought art and design is lost in this digital age?
In Let's Write: Design Your Own Fonts artist and graphic designer Julia Kaergel insists that there is still plenty of fun to be had in creating by hand. This oversize, landscape oriented book with high-quality thick matte stock throughout is full of art starters for children who only have to be old enough to know their letters and numbers to participate. Like working with watercolors? Try a sweep of a round brush to create the letters of the alphabet, add colored ink, and then blow air through a straw at the still-wet paint to spread the ink, yielding some pretty wild but still recognizable letters. Prefer fancy, fussy, serif-laden, doo-daddled letters? Use the graph lined sheets to create your own after the starter letters provided, creating an alphabet in which each letter looks inhabited by living swirly bugs. Like to work with other materials? Try pasta or sugar cubes to make shapes and letters. What about graffiti? The book encourages children to create their own signature graffiti inside the book on multiple paper "walls" created just for that purpose.
Letters, numbers, and shapes are not the only outlets for hand design in this book. There are sections in which the child can design his or her own T-shirt or even imagine and produce a bunch of labels for bottles of all shapes and sizes. Cutting out letters from other media such as magazines, print advertisements, and newspapers to create a mix-and-match alphabet is an option as is taking photos of beautiful lettering or objects that can be used to shape interesting and unique lettering.
The child does not need more than a pen and pencil to start usiing the book, making it perfect for a long car ride or lazy days during winter vacation. These basic materials can of course be expanded to build an entire library of drawing tools to get as fancy as desired.
Most importantly, as the author admonishes: "Have no fear. It's not about good spelling or handwriting. Quite the contrary. Here you'll be able to scribble, doodle, scrawl, paste, and play with letters to your heart's content."
How does this perfect holiday gift tie in to a child's digital life? Once the letters and numbers, labels and scripts are created here, they can be scanned in to provide even more hours of design and animation fun.