Gleam
Start exploring, the world is outside!
A fairytale about the importance of chasing dreams. The story is about Gleam, a small orange creature wearing a helmet who sees giant whales flying in the sky outside his window. He decides to leave his house to follow them, beginning his journey. The project itself is not limited to a book, but it takes different directions, ranging to a poster, a soft toy and a VR app.
Gleam is the story of a small creature that steps out of his door and gets on the road to follow something he saw in the sky. Whether the road in front of him is uphill or downhill, he keeps walking, because that’s what dreamers do. Gleam is a small auto-produced booklet. Super suggested for the ones who feel they’re on the road, looking for something.
Everyone gets stuck somewhere.
Also did Gleam, but then something happened:
he started walking, chasing something he saw in the sky.
A travel story about the road we travel
inside and outside of us when we have the courage
to follow our dreams.
Research
I started developing the looks of Gleam after a first draft of the narrative scheme was completed. The concepts were rough, with various forms of environment exploration.I hadn’t decided a color palette for the book, hence in this phase i tried different variations, mainly focusing on contrasts.
Journey
I needed to have a look to Gleam’s path, to try and maintain consistency across the book. So, I sketched a rough layout of his journey, to set the dominant shapes and colors.
The Book
Some of the books pages
Bonus content
To promote the book, I designed a poster to hang at Arfestival 5, a comics festival in Rome.
And to add a little bit more of spice, I experimented with animations to promote the book on social media!
VR Experience
To add a little extra spice to the project, I developed a simple 3d scene with a book environment to view on a Google Cardboard: kids at Arfestival loved it!
Exhibition and Feedback
I had a little desk in Self Arf 5, a comics festival in Rome. There, I had the chance to meet a lot of people, who saw the book and bought it. It was a great experience, I could not stop smiling 🙂