For this Wiki Britannica project, I decided to visit Wiki Roulette to automatically generate a few topics just to see what I could find. I was refreshing the page for about half an hour with no particular luck - I got suggested quite a few Polish villages not containing a lot of information, many politicians and other famous people from all around the world and various decades, nothing seemed to interest me. I started thinking about what kind of publication I would like to make and I stumbled upon children's books as I remember myself loving to read and get to know things when I was a child.

However, my initial idea was inspired by my little cousin who is a huge fan of books about the world and its' wonders. I thought about what would make him want to read a book and what would it be about. Him being a Lithuanian boy who is growing up surrounded by forests and kind of a mild climate I remembered the beautiful coral reefs that seem so extraordinary, yet very real and found in multiple places in the world. I am certain he has not seen them yet or heard a lot about them and this would make a perfect opportunity for him to read more about it. So I stopped there and started on my research.

I was hoping Wikipedia will give me loads on information on it and I wasn't mistaken. I got a whole page of information about all sorts of things - what is a coral reef, how and where does it form, what it needs to survive, who lives in it, etc. The only problem was the language all the information was written in. It is difficult for a young person to understand most of the words used in Wikipedia articles. So what I did was take out all of the information that I need for my book and develop it into children-friendly language. After I sorted out my information, I started to think about the illustrations that would work with it and made a list. I then drew them all on Illustrator and all it was left to do was the layout part, probably the most difficult one considering I had to make a lot of adjustments of the illustrations and the text during the process. 

To be honest, this book turned out to be one of the best works of mine in this whole unit. I was really happy throughout the process and I really like the final product. I believe that what makes 'Mysteries of a Coral Reef' quite a good publication is that it would immediately catch a child's attention due to bright colors and funky typeface choices, various colorful illustrations and a text which is just the right length (it gives you a lot of information but is explained quite briefly and in a very easy language). Nonetheless, I can now see quite a few errors taking a second look after a few weeks while making this workflow page. I now see that I should have used a different grid that would not put the text so close to the seam where both pages collide (as you can see in the mockup); also, some text lines from parallel pages are not aligning which they should be, etc. If I were to really publish this book someday, I would definitely fix these errors and who knows, this might become a perfect present for my cousin!