Color

Add content for a discussion on the use of **color and symbolization** in our atlas here.

By doing a childs atlas it opens up a lot of color possiblites. However we will have to be careful not to over do it. Having bright and cheerful color pallette can be good for kids and makes the atlas much more viberant. But if you use to many colors on one page it can be overwhelming. So we should limit the number of colors used on each page and try to be consistent about colors for the state background color, text color, and general themes. Taking that into consideration, primary and secondary colors and are simple and bright are common for childs books. [Astfgl]
 * What colors should we use?**

This is a good issue. I've noted several childerns books that rely too heavily on colors to convey the message. Restrict the colors and maintain consistency I say. [Nathan]

Too many bright colors could have a serious effect on kids prone to having seizures. This may lead to serious legal trouble. Maybe that's not true. Anyways, while we should use just enough color to emphasize the purpose we are trying to convey, we shouldn't over do it. Even if we aim at fourth graders as our audience, maybe older kids will enjoy it just as much.(Cole)

I too agree that we can't over do it with bright colors, but we should maybe look at some textbooks from what some of the elementary school books. As I remember that some of the maps looked dull and drab and never grabbed my attention. I especially remember a history book using a dull pinkish color, not a good choice. Also I think we should stick to the primary colors and try not to bring in to many offshoots and shades, I doubt what we will be presenting to the children per page would require more than 4 or 5 colors. (mfindley)

This is a tricky area because we do want color to promote interest in the material, however when is bright too bright? I agree with Mike above in that we do not want color to be the focus. The goal here is still to make a product that teaches geography. I vote for primary colors as well and a minimum on each page. (robg)

Just to clarify real quick what I meant with primary and secondary colors. Primary: Red, Yellow, Blue. Secondary: Green, Purple, Orange. Which would give us a basic color scheme to work off of. If you add a light, medium and dark for each of those. Something simliar to this: Obviously open for modification and comment. The only real objection I have to using such a bright and simple color palette is that the kids may not like it. 4th grade is about ten years old, and it has always been my experiance that kids from about 5 to 12 are very adamant that they are not babys. They hate being called babys and they avoid anything that they consider to be babyish. Considering that all very young childrens books are designed with this kind of a color palette the kids might deem it babyish. So we might have a better responce from the kids if we use a simplified version of what might be considered a more adult palette. Something like the following, still has the same range of colors and options but not so in your face bright, and a little bit more mature. [Astfgl]

I like Irene's color choices, the colors are not too childish and still adhere to our K-4 theme. [Nathan]

For a continuation on color possibilites, I looked at the fact that both of these options hve a rather limited number of colors in them. I decided to create a color scheme that hopefully adresses the interest in maturity of colors, the playfullness of colors, and the approximate number of colors needed. [Astfgl]

I know it would be a lot of work, but I think it woul be cool if we could have a bunch of matching little symbols to put on the maps. Some sort of a set that would match across all the themes but be simple for kids to understand. So either a little horse for a horse or a horseshoe, something like that, rather than just color differences. I don't know what symbol sets might be available to pull from, or clipart maybe. [Astfgl]
 * What symbolization strategies should we employ?**

I like symbols too as long as designing them does not take too long and will not take away from other important aspects of the Atlas. [Nathan]

I think our symbols should match the theme we are talking about. If we are drawing a map to show mining in Nevada, maybe we should have a miner or something of the sort to represent each mine. This makes the map more fun to look at and should make it easier to understand. (cole)

Remember we could always look around on the internet using google image search to find neat symbols, we could load them into Adobe and just shrink them down. I think this would be more important than color because It would help kids that learn visually make more connections to what they are seeing and have a better idea of what is going on with the map. Might want to stick to somewhat cartoon-ish figures, if we can find them, for the symbols to make them more fun. (mfindley)

One of the things that I would be a little concerned with in pulling symbol images off the web is that eventually this atlas may get published so we could run into copyright issues. Also most of the images you pull off of something like a goolge image search, have a white background box that cannot always be easily removed. So if you had a tan colored map of Nevada and you put that symbol on it, it would have a funky white box around it. Sometimes you can get rid of that in PhotoShop, but not always and not easily. But short of making all our own symbols (which would be time consuming), though it would offer us a consistent style throughout the atlas, I am not sure where to get the symbols. [Astfgl]

These are really good points. I think there is a fine line between using symbols that are pulled from the Internet that represent what we want and copyright infringment. We are not going to have enough time to actually go out and take our own pics so we need to think of how to represent the information we want in a graphical manner that does not infringe on anyone elses work. Sounds tough, perhaps there are sets of common map images that we could purchase on the web and use those. [Nathan]

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