Creating an illustrated alphabet for Brazilian Portuguese — how do I keep it clear for children?

Question

I’m working on some printable alphabet materials for children who are beginning to learn to read in Brazilian Portuguese, and I’ve run into a problem that I didn’t expect.

I want each letter to have a simple illustration that helps the child associate the letter with a familiar word. But some letters are surprisingly difficult to represent naturally in Portuguese. I don’t want to just put a random picture beside the letter if the word doesn’t actually help the child understand the sound or letter.

For example, I’m trying to make the pages simple enough for a preschool child to look at and immediately understand, without filling the page with too many colors, fonts, or objects.

I’m also struggling with the practical side in Adobe: what would be the best way to create a consistent set of 26 illustrated letters so that the illustrations, letter sizes, spacing, and print quality all stay consistent from A to Z?

For anyone who has designed educational printables or illustrated alphabets before, how would you approach this? Would you build everything in Illustrator, InDesign, or another Adobe app?

rowly23 · Accepted Answer

I’d probably go with one of two approaches. If you want everything consistent, Illustrator is a good choice because you can create one letter layout and reuse it for the whole alphabet, keeping the size, spacing and illustrations consistent.

The easier option is to use ready-made illustrations from free-resource sites and assemble them in Illustrator or InDesign. That saves a lot of time, especially for the letters that are harder to represent naturally in Portuguese.

Monika Gause · Answer

InDesign is perfect for building the layout. You can design a parent page that defines where everything goes and then just put the text and place the artworks. You would then use Illustrator or Photoshop (depending on the desired drawing style for the illustrations.

But since it’s not a lot of elements, Illustrator can work as well for the pages although I would not create the layout in Illustrator when you use Photoshop for the Illustrations.

It depends on where your focus is in the design of the pages.

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