Language to Literacy:
Layout Design, Graphics, and Digital Publishing
Overview
Language to Literacy is Brainspring’s first new major course since 2007. Brainspring describes Language to Literacy as a “comprehensive professional learning course that equips teachers with deep knowledge of structured literacy and the Orton-Gillingham multisensory strategies to apply it in their classrooms.” This project was huge, requiring a completely new, more modern style guide and typographic system, resulting in a 462 page textbook with nearly 100 graphics and an additional booklet of 40+ reproducible resources. I digitally published the Language to Literacy textbook and accompanying resource booklet on the Brainspring Digital Library.
Programs Used
InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, Kitaboo Platforms
Layout Design
I worked with my fellow designer on the publications team to create a final layout template that would be applied across the textbook’s 16 chapters. Populating the book with text provided by Brainspring’s Curriculum Development team was a collaborative effort; we both had to adapt the book’s template to fit the content of each chapter. These chapters varied in length requiring differing amounts of graphics and tables be created according the copywriters’ notes. The overall layout also required many new type styles to fit the breadth of content: from primary header down to quaternary header, primary bullets, secondary bullets, table and cells, table bullets, endnotes, and more.
Graphics
While Brainspring’s primary brand colors, navy, green, and berry, were and anchor point in the design of Language to Literacy, we developed a new set of light colors, a gradient from pale green to light purple, to accent the layout and to make up a majority of the graphics coloration. I created Language to Literacy’s graphics with the intent of keeping them light, legible, and easy to digest. I opted for a mostly lineless style, only utilizing lines to create small icons in the style of the contour line drawings used throughout the book.
Resource Documents
Much like Brainspring's other courses, Language to Literacy comes packaged with downloadable resources for teachers, parents, and students. I designed these resources with the new design choices we made for the course in mind, and created black and white styles for several of the printer-friendly resources. Some resources were intended to be used digitally, such as the Course Companion. The Course Companion is a digital form course participants use to reflect on their experiences and what they learned in the course. This document has interactive fields to be filled however the user sees fit.
Digital Publishing
Upon completion I digitally published all the Language to Literacy courseware on the Brainspring Digital Library. This collection of courseware includes publications that appear in every course collection as well as Language to Literacy Library News, the Language to Literacy textbook, and Language to Literacy Resources Booklet.
The digital textbook includes interactive graphics that can be opened to view at a larger scale, customizable bookmarks and notes, and a digital table of contents built in the library’s reader. The resources booklet consists of thumbnails of the available course resources. Users can click to download, print, or view a resource. The library news book contains an embedded video with information on the library as well as text detailing any changes that come to the library.
