As an Early childhood educator, I value genuine conversation with children, especially about topics considered not for kids. Having honest conversations with them can be insightful for both children and adults. The main goal of this platform is to provide information for parents and educational communities. Through this website, you can have access to videos showing how to engage in healthy conversations, how-to guides to implement these sessions at home, etc.
During the pandemic, children get information from secondary sources and have thousands of questions about it. Providing a safe and honest space to talk about COVID-19 is healthy, and it made sense to be the first topic we embarked on.
DESIGN DECISIONS
1. CHILDREN'S DRAWINGS
Throughout the website, I introduced different icons, arrows, and signs that I designed in conjunction with my niece.
2. BREAKING THE GRID
I started designing the website with a template, but then I noticed that it was my word enemy because it was making my designs fall into a stereotypical webpage. I wanted it to have a spontaneous feel paired with the idea of children's original thoughts. I set some ground rules to achieve cohesiveness and started moving forward.
3. ORIGINAL TYPEFACE
I also designed a Typeface with my niece. We made different lettering exercises to allow her to feel free and make the characters her own. The variety of this typeface centers on the wonky strokes and the extreme shifts in size, sometimes nonsensical. Given that this typeface encompasses a lot of movement and details, I decided to pair it with a clean all-caps digital type to avoid over-designing the webpage and competition between both fonts.
4. CLASH OF OBJECTS
Overlays of objects often appear on the platform. This specific decision is born from analyzing children's drawings where space, dimensions, and organization are still in development. They came up with innovative solutions and placements of things that I tried to incorporate into the design.
5. AUDIOVISUAL MATERIAL
This platform is loaded with image galleries, videos, audio, documents, and PDFs to make it more relatable and more accessible for people to understand the thought processes in a simple conversation and how to recognize them.