Paper Design

It's an odd thing redesigning something as simple and common as writing paper, but that was the idea when Connor's teacher and school councilor mentioned that special paper with extra guides might help him learn to write better.

Connor, basically hates writing. He actually hates most things that require him to hold a pencil or crayon. I'm not sure why or where the tendency came from, but it's the truth.

Depending on his mood, his handwriting can range from pretty elementary, to downright illegible. His baseline wanders, as does his x-height and when he's really tired, he seems to have no understanding of word spacing at all. One word flows directly into another, which flows directly into another. It's almost as if you have to translate his writing in order to read it.

The teach had a couple of samples of this special writing paper and it basically had a solid yellow bar where his lower character shapes were supposed to go and the normal guidelines as well.

I thought to myself, "Connor's not going to want to use some special kind of paper." He's never big on change and this definitely would be a change. But, what if he used special paper because it was 'cool' and 'unique' and didn't look like a throwback to his first grade days? I asked the teacher if it would be ok if I designed some paper for him, even if it had references to games he plays on it.

Her response was simple, if it gets him to write better so she can read his writing she was all for it, whatever it was.

So that day I gave writing paper some serious thought.  The theme was easy enough, Halo is one of his favorite games...we'll make it Halo paper. Then the functionality of it all came to mind. How do we get him to stay within the guidelines? The answer was easy enough, you can't write on black paper with a black pencil, so we'll just make all the negative space around the guidelines black...or just very, very dark.

Next was the guides themselves. We started with the normal top and baseline guides with the dotted x-height guide in the middle but, with the black negative space we had to add a guide for the descenders. Then I added vertical guides to help keep his letter sizes consistent, and maybe more importantly, to help with his spacing between words.

Ultimately, I was ok with him starting off with heavily themed Halo paper but I wanted to have that slowly phased out as he got better with his handwriting. So I designed  a four step phased approach where each step one of the guides or guide types was removed. By the time he leveled up to the end of the program he would be writing on normal paper. I just have no idea how long that's going to take.

Once I completed the designs we gave it a test run. I wasn't sure how well he would be able to write on the paper itself. I showed Connor the level 1 paper, which he though was very cool as it was heavily themed with Halo UNSC images. Then we gave him a sentence to write. "I like games." We wanted to try something simply because he typically tries to write the shortest sentence possible.

To our surprise he wrote "I like to play video games.". He wrote it quickly (for Connor), and it was very clear and legible. None if his words blended together. There were a couple of individual letters that took up more that the one allotted spot, but at least he was consistent about it.

We considered this initial test a huge success. Now we just needed to see how it would work at school.

So the next day I showed the teacher the paper. I had printed out 10 or 12 copies so he had enough for a few days. And she seemed to like the idea. Then we just had to see if it was effective.

At the end of the day, Danielle picked Connor up from school and he said the teacher said it was way, way, way, way, way, way (I think I got that write) than his normal writing.

Now we'll just have to see if it sticks, and if it improves his handwriting in the future.

But for now, it's another small victory.