First steps in designing a beginner piano book

In my last post, I introduced a passion project I worked on recently — designing my own beginner piano book! I took the day off work to dedicate myself to dreaming big and taking my first playful steps in envisioning what this dream could look like in reality.

Here’s an update on what I was able to accomplish in an afternoon! Check out this video to see me thumb through the earliest stages of my design and organization. There are some important principles of instructional design at play here, already in these first stages.

Principles of educational media design

1) Use a pencil

First, as much as possible, it’s important to keep your initial ideas loose and flexible. This means “pencilling in” your ideas, literally, and keeping your initial designs sketchy. Resist the urge to start planning details like layout, colours, and page numbers right away. You’ll get more committed to your ideas the more detail you put into them, and at initial stages we want to maintain an objective distance so we can evaluate them fairly. Sketch your ideas with a pencil so you can take a few days to think about them, test them, and erase the ones that don’t prove to be as valuable.

2) Create order out of chaos

After you have collected a bunch of ideas, start to arrange your ideas in an order that makes sense to you. Usually it’s a good idea to move from easiest to hardest, but what that entails is really up for debate. Think about the flow of skills you’re aiming to develop. Are you leaving enough time to both learn and reinforce each skill? Many new designers are tempted to mimic the order or style of books that are already published, but I think this misses an opportunity to bring your own educational insight to the table! Draw on your teaching experience to inform you when you might leave a little extra room here, or speed things up a little there, or change the order completely. Don’t be afraid to try something new — if it expresses your energy for this topic, that’s all that matters at this point.

3) Test with a real audience

If you want to have a product that is as effective as you hope it will be, it’s important to test your ideas with your target audience as early into the design process as possible. I can’t stress this step enough — your ideas may be really good, but unless they also resonate with your audience they won’t spread. You’re way better off knowing how your audience responds to your ideas in the pencil stage than after you’ve poured your heart and soul into its development! Keep all your songs, layouts, and order of your book held as a “maybe” until you’ve actually seen how your audience responds. This will give you objective evidence as to why to include certain songs, exclude others, or scrap it all for a better idea. Try not to see this step as deflating your inspiration for this idea, but instead as giving it its best chance to fly!

Thanks for following the design process of my book, and I hope this helps give you some direction on developing something of your own!