Illustration
Digital Design
Caminos Visual Language
Translating educational content goes beyond just the written word—it also involves translating visually, finding new nuances and unique attributes that truly resonate with the audience. In our case, this presented an opportunity to infuse a bit of Latin flavor into Caminos Digital Experience, a program designed for bilingual students across the United States.
Visualizing Caminos: Bridging Cultures
Our first step was to translate certain components of the existing CKLA visual language (the English counterpart of Caminos) to fit the Spanish-language material. Since the stories, lessons, characters, and overall mood are deeply rooted in Latin American culture, the accompanying visual elements needed to reflect this accordingly. In other words, the visual components surrounding the program had to 'speak' a familiar but ultimately, new language.
CKLA
Caminos
We've explored several design elements that are subtle but make a significant impact. These designs were inspired by cultural mood boards curated by our Latin designers and illustrators, with regions spanning from Colombia, Puerto Rico, Peru, and Mexico to the Dominican Republic. After distilling and simplifying the inspiration we gathered from Latin cultures, we updated three base shapes from CKLA and introduced two new ones to the Caminos set of base shapes..
These newly created shapes, unique to Caminos, complete the foundational group of forms, combining the legacy forms from CKLA (in grey) with the new shapes to form a definitive set of base shapes.
Unifying Elements: The Heart of Caminos
With a final set of shapes in hand, it was time to have fun and experiment with the endless combinations these forms could be paired into. With the goal of creating a cohesive and visually harmonious set of base collages that would unify the visual language of Caminos, we produced countless iterations. During that process, these twenty-four base collages revealed themselves to be the most functional and lively. These were selected to serve as the vessels for pictures, illustrations, patterns, and all the Caminos lore.
Crafting the Final Touch
Even though we were happy with the result at this point, we felt that something was missing. Once we began building the final collages with images and illustrations, we sensed that there was room for an additional unifying element. That feeling sparked the creation of a more nuanced group elements. Inspired by the richness of textures, art, pottery, landscapes, and sounds from Latin American cultures, we created these complementary set of patterns.
Caminos: A Collage Journey
The final project resulted in over seven hundred collages, each representing a lesson, a poem, a short story, a folk tale, or a biography. Here are some highlights. This is the visual language of the Caminos Digital Experience
