xperience and that would enable them to do something they haven’t done before.
If you want to do that, you’ll need to suppress the urge to start on screen and spend a bit more time in the planning stage. The reward is a much tighter fit between your design and the kids you’re designing for.
Case Studies And Tutorials
The websites identified above as examples of good design share a number of characteristics, including a strong visual style, plenty of color and a focus on clarity. Cartoons are perhaps the most popular style right now, but designers have a lot of options. A look at the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods would help most teams. The right side of the table is the place to pick up ideas on designing for kids.
Archives and Museum Informatics reviews the design process for the Tate Gallery’s online resources for kids aged 6 to 12. The case study, titled “Doing It for the Kids: Tate Online on Engaging, Entertaining and (Stealthily) Educating Six to 12-Year-Olds,” offers a step-by-step approach to meeting the design requirements of a large organization. Cartoons and comics are not the only option, but they have a visual language that many kids appreciate. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics has been around for a while, and it is an invaluable guide to designing comic art or in a comic style in any media.
Participants in the 2011 SxSW Interactive festival visualized the entire conference using infographics. Their efforts led to the remarkable display of sketches, charts and diagrams on display at Ogilvy Notes. One of the visualizations is all about Web design for kids and well worth a visit. The chart provides a good starting point for thinking about what factors to take into account when mapping out a website for kids.
Web designers with strong graphic design skills have a valuable weapon in their arsenal. Those without affordable access to such skills could be at a disadvantage, but it’s surprising how much can be achieved with a digital camera and some cheap software. For example, Comic Life is inexpensive and able to apply a wide range of comic layouts and styles, yielding some fairly credible results in PDF format.