Designing my Katakana

Katakana Illustrations

Each chapter of my book contains 1 of 5 categories of the katakana alphabet, each category represents sounds ending in each of the 5 vowels we have in our alphabet.

I wanted to design the characters in a typically Japanese style whilst making the content more enjoyable and interesting to look at. I looked at a number of styles used in Japanese design including cartoon and anime styles.

I decided on the colour shadow with the white light spots. The version with the dots behind looks too complicated and confusing. The grey shadow looks too boring and not playful enough.

I've taken influence from playful and eye catching Japanese publications I found online to design my katakana characters.

This typography is well recognised and has clear a relationship with Japan, the location of my content. As my publication is mainly just a dictionary, I have made sure to design the content in a playful and engaging way, this will make the book more enjoyable for the user along with making it easy to use through tabs and colour coding.

Each chapter will have an introduction page like the examples above. Each character indicates the last letter of each sound found in that chapter. I chose 5 bold colours 

For example, after the intro page with the green character on it (translating into the letter U), there will be the pages that include every pronunciation ending in U within the katakana alphabet and so on.