The Telling Board

February - April 2018

Project Status: COMPLETED

Tools: Krita

“The Telling Board uses the concept of storyboarding (organizing graphics in sequence) to enable children ages 6 and up to conceptualize and build their own narratives. By populating square grids on the board with their choice of either pre-illustrated or their own hand drawn “story cards,” children practice crafting stories in sequence from beginning to end. They are able to tell those stories and share them via a built-in recording mechanism on the board.” Link to Conference Paper

I was one of the primary illustrators for the Telling Board project, in which I designed and illustrated characters and scenes that children would hopefully empathize with. One of the primary considerations was also to encourage children to draw or add in their own cards, so the style is simplistic and some cards have blank faces or speech bubbles. I also designed the characters and emotions to be easy to differentiate at a glance, with both color and shape language. This has the added benefit of being accessible to colorblind users.

For this project, I created 10 full cards, which filled one storyboard slot, and 42 half-cards that could be placed side by side to emulate a full card.