Education Communications | Creative Direction | Publishing & Production Leadership
Executive Snapshot
An education programme for UNICEF and South Africa’s Department of Basic Education required a complete set of learning resources across five cohorts. Books, illustrations, activity materials and practitioner guidance needed to work together, serving both children and the adults supporting their learning.
Working through a third-party partner, I led creative direction and production across a nine-month programme, including an intensive six-month delivery period. My responsibility covered team formation, creative coordination and the production process through final print delivery.
The work brought extensive educational content into a coherent family of resources, with versions prepared for print and web, in colour and black and white.
The Communication Challenge
The challenge was to make a large body of educational material clear, consistent and practical across five learning cohorts.
Children needed engaging stories, recognisable images and activities they could follow. Practitioners needed clear instructions, preparation guidance and supporting resources they could connect during a session. Each audience required a different level of detail within the same system.
A storybook could not be designed in isolation from its related activities. Practitioner guidance, picture cards, posters and observation materials needed to agree in their naming, visual language and organisation.
Production added another layer of complexity. Multiple specialists worked across interdependent materials under a demanding schedule. Creative consistency and content accuracy had to hold across every component and output format.
My Role
As Creative Director, I built and coordinated the multidisciplinary production team. The team structure included a creative director, two designers, three typesetters, five illustrators, two project managers, two quality controllers and two proofreaders.
I led the creative and production process, connecting design, illustration, typesetting, proofing, quality control and print preparation. This included maintaining direction across the resource families and coordinating the work through review and final delivery.
UNICEF and the Education Department supplied the educational copy. Illustration, design, typesetting and specialist production were team contributions under my direction. My role was to bring those disciplines together and keep the complete programme coherent.
The Creative Response
The organising principle was learning by design: every resource needed a clear purpose and a clear relationship to the wider set.
The programme was structured around five cohorts, each with its own coordinated collection of materials. A consistent design framework connected the books, classroom resources and practitioner documents while allowing each component to serve its specific task.
Learning Through Story
Each cohort included two Big Books, with ten stories in each book. Across the five cohorts, this created a publishing scope of ten Big Books containing 100 stories.
Illustration and page design needed to support the supplied stories while remaining consistent across the collection. Creative direction connected the work of five illustrators with the design and typesetting teams, keeping individual contributions within a shared visual framework.
From Reading to Activity
The learning materials extended beyond the books into colour, number, shape, height and code cards or posters, alongside twenty exercise posters per cohort.
These components needed to feel connected to the wider programme. The design task was to make relationships between resources easy to recognise, so stories and activities could form part of the same learning experience.
Supporting the Practitioner
Each cohort also included a practitioner manual, an observation manual and a resources book. These materials served the adults preparing, guiding and recording learning activities.
Information hierarchy mattered as much as visual appeal. Instructions, material lists and preparation guidance needed a clear reading order. Related activities and resources needed to be easy to locate and connect.
The design direction centred on practical use: helping practitioners understand what to prepare, which resources to use and how the components belonged together.
Connecting Formats
The scope included a video book and a box for each cohort’s resource set. Outputs were prepared for print and web, with colour and black-and-white versions.
This required consistency beyond the full-colour printed page. Typography, layout and image treatment needed to preserve meaning across the different versions. Packaging brought each cohort’s materials together as a complete collection.
Publishing and Production Leadership
The programme required sustained coordination across creative work and detailed production. Changes to one resource could affect related illustrations, page layouts, supporting materials or output files.
I brought the specialist teams into one production process, coordinating their contributions across the nine-month engagement. Project management, proofreading and quality control supported the creative work through the intensive delivery period and final print preparation.
This was a leadership assignment across an extensive publishing programme. It required an understanding of both the individual page and the dependencies across the complete set.
Educational and Communication Value
The project brought five cohorts of educational resources into a connected publishing system. Storytelling, classroom activities, practitioner guidance and observation materials shared a consistent design direction and production framework.
The value lay in making specialist educational content usable across different audiences and formats. Children’s materials prioritised engagement and recognition. Practitioner resources prioritised preparation, navigation and clear instruction.
Together, the materials provided a coordinated foundation for programme delivery, connecting the content, people and production disciplines behind an extensive education programme.
What This Project Demonstrates
Education communication, nonprofit creative leadership, information design, illustration direction, complex publishing, multidisciplinary team management, quality control and print production.
The project shows my ability to translate a substantial institutional brief into a connected set of practical materials, while leading the people and production process needed to deliver it.
