New Layout and Content Ideas

One of my critique feedback comments was that this week I should begin to think more thoroughly about content and how I might actually lay out the double page spreads of my book. Although the main focus is the production of the book, it is important for the content to successfully reflect the theme and production methods.

I knew that I wanted my first page to be the Arabic alphabet with English phonetics below. This lead to the idea of the alphabet letters in English and Arabic to be the main focus on all of the pages, these would be foiled throughout the book. Each double page spread would contain a body of text next to a letter from each alphabet; the English alphabet letter would reflect/match the Arabic letter that sounds most like it.

In my head, I imagined this design to look a lot more effective and structured. However, when translating my sketches digitally, they didn't look as good. On the other hand, the big letters would be foiled, so this design may look a lot better physically, I will have to test this and see.

The sketches/image below shows the translations of the Arabic letters with English phonetics below each letter. I then translated each Arabic letter to the English letter that is most similar to it. However, I noticed that not every Arabic letter translates to a letter from the English alphabet...e.g there is no letter in the Arabic alphabet that sounds like a 'P' or a 'C'. I then narrowed the alphabets just down to the letters that sound most the same.

Refined final alphabet; English vs Urdu:

Example:

ا : A

ب : B

The rest of the English letters that translate to an Arabic letter: A,B,T,J,H,D,R,Z,S,Q,F,G,K,L,M,N,Y,E,W