08 June 2017 by Suyen Hu
As part of my voluntary work at a local school, helping children to read, I went to see the year three children (aged seven to eight years) for the first time today. I realised they all could read our Animal Signs books easily without any difficulty! That’s good, because the books are meant for children aged five to seven. When the children were reading the story, they also looked at the Chinese characters and told me the meaning in English word by word because they've seen the English texts next to the Chinese texts. I didn't even need to tell them anything about my design or the function of the colour codes. It just worked naturally, which is what we always intended.
For me, as a designer for years, it's the meaning of design indeed! Design is for people to use products with pleasure and to follow the function naturally and to enjoy a good experience with the products. If our books are enjoyable for those pupils who are supposed to have some reading difficulties, and all of them can learn something from the books easily without me playing games with them to bring them back to reading, I would think our products are designed very well with all the purposes that we believe are important for readers to enjoy learning.
