We’re almost there. Tomorrow is the day when this beginning comes to an end. Because the day after tomorrow is the start of the real Illustrapedia.

If you haven’t figured by now, Illustrapedia is supposed to be a real illustrated encyclopedia. These small pixels are only a tiny hint of what I want to create. But why create an encyclopedia? We have Wikipedia, How Stuff Works, Encyclopædia Britannica. And the answer is: because they focus on text while I (and a lot of people out there, especially kids) work best with images.

Nicely illustrated encyclopedias were where my head was at throughout my childhood. They fueled my imagination, broadened my horizons and gave me a million ideas of what kind of computer games I want to make. But not all educational children’s books are the same. I’ve developed a taste for them and when I browse through many on today’s shelves I don’t find the same charm that were in the ones I had.

Let me illustrate what I am talking about.

The bad

My parents apparently had incredibly good taste in what books to buy. But one day I got a children’s encyclopedia about minerals as a gift from somewhere else. It looked something like this modern example:

A bunch of photos from various sources slapped together. Let’s just say it didn’t capture my imagination. I see this all over. Books about history that have images of fossils instead of an illustration of the times in which they were created. Collections of archaeological objects don’t tell the story to a kid! It’s your job as the author to use your expertise to show that story to them.

It’s the same in science. You think a mix of photos you bought on iStock will make me want to become an astronaut? Think again. But I did spend my childhood turning a page after page of a great book about space, imagining flying the space shuttle or landing on the moon. Which brings me to …

The good

Hello, art direction! It seems in the 80s people still payed great illustrators to work their magic and create books with gorgeous illustrations. And I would say the above example is from the least imaginative form my childhood. Here’s a nice piece about the roman army from my childhood:

Don’t show me what old pieces of crap you dug up, let me see what actually happened in those times! It’s why I loved playing Ceasar II: seeing an actual roman city in front of my eyes. Even better, I was actually building it myself, learning about their way of life, economy and such.

Here’s a recent example of an imaginative way to teach history. It’s what a newspaper would look like, if it would be written in those times. I picked it up recently, which leaves me some hope.

But where it all really started, where I got the main influence for how I want Illustrapedia to look like, was this set of 6 books from the end of the 70s. They were titled in the sense of “What is this?”, “Where is it?”, “How does it work?” and “What should I become?”. They were more proper encyclopedias with 500 entries each and answered questions about nature, Earth, great people, technology and even what job you can do when you grow up. Each entry featured a big illustration in a coherent style, a title and the description in various levels of details.

As a kid I would browse through all 6 volumes again and again. It’s where I gained my first interest in science and what planted a seed of curiosity and thirst for knowledge that easily kept me engaged in school.

While I love Wikipedia for the gains it gives me to me as an adult student, I don’t see a big textual work full of convoluted scientific words engaging younger generations just as well as carefully edited illustrated encyclopedias with great art direction did in the past.

That’s why I want to make Illustrapedia.