For my research, I found that I was most interested in the school system and how young children are unable to be expressive because they’re given rules and told whats considered right and wrong at such a young age.  I looked at youtube videos and different statistics and thought of different ways I could portray my idea. Before coming to this final piece I had a number of different ideas. One of them was simply using photoshop to edit my font onto a whiteboard in a classroom filled with children, another one was to create a 3D tree with the letters in my font hanging from the tree. This would represent how it is natural for children to be expressive. However, I wanted to make something that people could interact with, not just a piece of paper or something that you could only observe. The idea of creating a ‘new’ dictionary came from the thought that the first thing that we do as children is learn new words and in school expanding our vocabulary is key. The dictionary itself is quite boring, especially for a young child as its so perfect and neat.

I created this dictionary using a cardboard box, making it stronger by layering card on top using glue and then painting it brown with acrylic paint. In terms of the font, I wanted it to be quite free and colourful to appeal to young kids. I looked at different fonts and colours and came to this conclusion. I used a basic font to type out ‘The English Dictionary’ to contrast with the word ‘new’. To achieve the look of a dictionary I layered a number of photocopied pages of the dictionary to make it thicker and once all the pages had been printed out I painted my font on to each page, both upper and lower case.

Overall I was pleased with the outcome as I focused on a unique way to present it. The task wasn’t too difficult as there were a number of different things I could create to get a similar outcome however, if I had more time I would’ve created a font digitally and found a way to photoshop it onto the dictionary pages to make it look more professional. But overall I think the chaos of the dictionary creates a sense of freedom which it might’ve lacked if I made it too neat.