Richmond Children First (RCF) is a community initiative that strengthens the capacity of the community of Richmond to understand the needs of families, and to foster innovative strategies to best support children. As such, they produced a brochure called "Growing Together" that they provided for families to guide them through the early years of parenthood. It was last printed in 2014, and in need of a redesign.
This time though, RCF wanted to combine the English and Chinese language versions in order to assist folks in the community who had troubles with speaking English. By putting corresponding English and Chinese sections of the booklet side-by side, this allows the booklet to act as a sort of translation guide. This requirement was particularly challenging from a design perspective, since in general, Chinese words and phrases take up less space on the page than English text. In order to solve this predicament and to keep the layout balanced, I created a varied set of page templates that could be adjusted to fit the wildly varying amounts of content per spread, and use the RCF imagery bank to its fullest extent.
As for the look and feel, RCF wanted it to look cleaner and brighter than the old version, and to tie it into the new Richmond Kids.ca site that had since been tethered to the organization. The challenge was to keep it bright, cheerful and child-oriented, but appeal to the adults reading it and to not distract from the content. I noticed that both the RCF and Richmond Kids website used a shade of purple in their respective palettes, so by adjusting the hues slightly and simplifying the RCF palette, I was able to make bold, complementary suite of colours to incorporate both brands. As for the imagery, I searched for images that had a warm "golden" feel to them to compliment the green palette. I also treated section header imagery with a gentle orange filter to tie the style together from section to section, adjusting the colour balance of images as necessary.
The end result? A comprehensive, visually cohesive, 125 page booklet that seamlessly connects the English and Chinese language families of Richmond.
For comparison, below is the old 2014 English edition of the booklet in need of a revamp.
