Sample Double Page Spread for CBeebies "I Can Cook"

"I Can Cook" is the BBC's vehicle to help get children to cook simple dishes with the aid of an adult. Not only does it teach about cooking but it also helps children understand where food 'comes from'. Many think it just comes from a 'supermarket' or similar but the BBC helps explain how vegetables grow and where certain ingredients come from in some of their programmes. 

I chose to produce a sample double page spread for this recipe.

The aim of the task was to create visuals to help introduce children (age 5-7) to just one of the various recipes available. All of the recipes on the website seemed to be pretty wordy so there didn't seem to be a way around avoiding large quantities of text (given that it's a recipe and all the text is necessary). I decided to choose a clear, handwritten font for the bulk of the text so that it is easy to read by both the child and adult accompanying them. The title and numbers are a little more stylistic to add a little variation to grab the child's interest and to also suit the aesthetic of the recipe. I settled on leaving the text in white boxes to help with legibility and integrated these with colourful borders. 

Given the fact that a lot of the double page spread would be text, I decided to add visuals to balance this. I determined that the main image should be a photograph of the meal that the child would be cooking, as this is always useful in order to see what you're aiming for when preparing food. I then included colourful borders (again, on theme with the recipe) and illustrations of cacti and various animals found in Mexico and South America, all overlaid on a wooden chopping board. The illustration style is clean and simple to appeal to various ages, and is bright and eye-catching to draw the eye in and lead it around the page.