Silver Education, Teaching Aid and Training Content Design · 2025
History Flows As One Textbook
by Kiwook Kim
- A' Design Award 2025 Silver Winner in Education, Teaching Aid and Training Content Design
- Awarded April 15, 2025
- CLIENT: MiraeN
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 53,317
- Verification code E6A4541D29 · Verify this award
About History Flows As One Textbook
History Flows As One is a high school Korean history textbook. The design is divided into two books, the first showing daily life in the past and the second showing the present. Each cover presents a figure from a different era walking toward the other, while a dog links the two scenes. Placed side by side, the two covers form one complete illustration. Parts of the artwork are finished with gilding. Each book measures 220 by 280 by 6 millimeters. The intent is to present history as one continuous story.
Mirae-N Design Team's History Flows As One Textbook represents a thoughtful contribution to educational publishing design, demonstrating how visual communication can bridge temporal distances while fostering cultural appreciation among student audiences. The paired volumes employ a sophisticated design strategy wherein chromatic temperature and architectural subject matter work in concert to suggest historical progression: the first volume's cool blue atmosphere and traditional tile-roofed compounds establish a foundation in heritage, while the second's warmer twilight palette and contemporary residential architecture bring that narrative toward present experience. This approach reflects broader trends in educational material design that recognize visual engagement as essential to learning, moving beyond purely functional information delivery toward aesthetically rich experiences that honor the gravity of historical subject matter. The illustrative technique demonstrates accomplished handling of atmospheric perspective, with distant mountain silhouettes and cloud formations creating convincing spatial recession while maintaining the approachable quality essential for student materials. Particularly notable is the design team's decision to include consistent figure types across both volumes: the traditional dress rendered in flowing fabrics, the small white companion animals, and the intergenerational groupings suggest that while settings and eras change, human experiences of daily life, companionship, and family maintain continuity. The typographic treatment merits attention for its integration of text within organic cloud-shaped forms, allowing necessary identifying information to coexist with illustration rather than interrupting it. Color relationships reveal careful orchestration: complementary interactions between blue-orange and analogous progressions through violet-mauve-pink demonstrate chromatic sophistication that elevates these works beyond typical textbook design. The viewer might contemplate how such visual bridges between past and present shape historical understanding and cultural identity formation among young learners engaging with heritage through these carefully crafted educational objects.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- This book is the cover of a newly designed high school Korean history textbook in 2024. The familiar and emotional design, like a novel book, allows textbooks to become more interested and naturally immerse themselves in the subject of history beyond the role of simple information delivery. In particular, approaches such as novel books are designed to change the perception of textbooks, ease the academic burden on students, and make them want to read leisurely like books.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The size of the book is 220mm x 280mm x 6mm and is divided into two books.
- Production Technology
- Divided into two books to show the connection between the past and the present, the first book deals with daily life in the past and the second book deals with the present. Each book features a man and a woman who time- slip at different times walking toward each other. The dog on the cover acts as a medium to connect the past and the present, and shows the effect of each book becoming one when they meet each other. In addition, the gilded treatment of a part of the painting emphasizes the core luxuriousness and speciality of the design
- Design Challenge
- Korean history textbooks approached like novel books can make students feel Korean history as a living story and provide a moving and direct learning experience beyond the existing hard and boring academic approach. An emotional and immersive approach will help students learn important lessons in life and play an important role in making history a lesson for the future not just an event of the past.
- Project Duration
- The project was planned and produced from January to August 2024, and will be used as a high school textbook starting in the first semester of 2025.
- Operation Flow
- Korean history textbooks will serve as a story that allows students to feel how the past and present connect, not just learning materials. Although each book is also valuable independently, the fact that the two books have complete meaning only when they are together can explore how past experiences influence current choices and further raise a deep interest in history.
- Research
- The connection between the past and the present through the emotional approach of storytelling, visual design like a novel book, and time-slip motif will revolutionize the nature of the textbook. It provides students with in- depth learning experiences, improves the quality of history education, and develops the ability to apply historical events to life based on better understanding. In this process, history will not be a simple memorization subject, but will be able to feel as part of one’s identity and life.
- Inspiration
- With the theme of You in the Past, Me in the Present as a motif of time slip, it was unraveled as an emotional and immersive illustration that naturally connects the past and the present. Through design that expresses the scenes in which characters from the two eras communicate and emphasizes the continuity of history and learning, it conveys to students that history is not a disconnected story but a continuous story.
- Image Credits
- #1: Yoohee Won, #2: Yoohee Won, #3: Yoohee Won, #4: Yoohee Won, #4: Yoohee Won, #5: Yoohee Won