Sommerles.no - Visual and Print Design

Sommerles.no is an annual summer reading campaign held in Norway, for children in classes 1 to 7. It is undertaken in partnership with libraries all over the country from June to end of August, with children from over 370 municipalities participating to make the campaign a rousing success. I contribute to the project in conceptualization, character design, background illustration, website design, typography, and other visual design work.

Every year, Sommerles also releases an exclusive story for the participants to unlock weekly and win achievements from a quiz based on it. This story revolves around the adventures of Astrid and Asbjorne, whose characters are based off of Norse mythology. A new theme is chosen for this story and surrounding visuals each year. For 2019, the theme was a blood-red aurora foretelling great disaster in terms of climate change. The story was based in the area of Nordkapp and featured a long journey across snowy vistas to reach a scientist who has the solution to climate change.
I also conceptualize chapter illustrations and design key items for this story.

This year, I made designs for a printed gym bag, two posters, paper bookmarks, magnetic bookmarks, wristbands, Facebook advertisements, flyers etc. all of which featured the character designs.

The largest focus was put on creating a design that printed in CMYK just as accurately as it would look on screen. Considering that we were working with deep blues and bright reds, this was especially difficult, because the shades that we used to go along with the theme were difficult and precise combinations of the CMYK spectrum. The second challenge was to create color compositions that reflected the feel of being on snowy mountains under an Aurora-lit sky. Lastly, the chapter images that we drew for this year’s story had much more detailed and descriptive thumbnails than before and it would be a challenge to make the correct information fit in a small frame and make it look natural.

Aside from the usual set of prizes and printables, we also helped conceptualize an animated video in collaboration with a different studio, for which I provided character assets and a small amount of direction.

In addition to the illustrations and visual designs, like every year I also worked on UI design for the website. Key design decisions in the website were selecting theme-neutral colors, designing a header frame, and fitting the background elements thematically to the layout.