Flora and Fauna of Aditi Garden, Magarpatta city
This project is a flora and fauna field guide created for the Environmental Club of Magarpatta City, documenting the plant and animal life of the township with a focus on Aditi Garden. Structured like a textbook, it brings together species entries for trees, birds, and mammals alongside articles and paintings from different contributors, unified through a modular grid that lets reference content and personal artwork coexist on the page. Guiding readers through it is Madhu the Bee, a mascot who appears in green captions with fun facts, leaving behind a dotted flight trail that turns each spread into something to explore. Designed for a mixed audience of children, families, and adults visiting the garden, the book closes with a photography-led cover and embossed typography, giving it the tactile feel of a real field guide.
about The Client
The Environmental Club of Magarpatta City approached this project with a simple but ambitious brief: a book documenting the flora and fauna of their township, anchored around Aditi Garden the green heart of the community. Not a brochure, not a pamphlet, but a proper field guide that residents, visiting families, and the club itself could hold onto for years.
Needs
The brief called for something closer to a textbook than a coffee-table book structured, reference-style spreads for trees, birds, and mammals, each following a consistent template. But it also had to hold contributions from many hands: articles and paintings from different members and artists connected to Aditi Garden, all needing to sit together on the page without feeling like a scrapbook. The challenge from day one was coexistence of content types, of contributors, of tone.
layouting
The book is built on a modular grid, which let species entries (trees, birds, mammals) stay consistent in structure image block, common and scientific name, description, habitat notes while still leaving room for the more expressive contributed articles and paintings to breathe within the same system. The grid is what makes "one book, many hands" actually hold together.
Book mockups
the mascot madhu
Madhu the Bee is the book's guide and connective thread. She flies across spreads in green caption boxes, offering asides, fun facts, and explanations that soften the more textbook-like entries a friendly voice reader can follow between the formal species entries. Behind her, a dotted flight trail runs through the pages, stitching sections together visually and giving young readers a path to follow spread to spread. The recurring prompt "check what Madhu has to say" turns each page into something to hunt through, not just read.
MADHU IN BOOK LAYOUTS
Madhu leaving a dotted train and her caption in green around the book for the reader to pause and read the fun information Madhu has to say.
challenges
The hardest part wasn't the content it was the people behind it. Coordinating multiple photographers and illustrators, each with a distinct visual style, into a single publication that reads as cohesive rather than patchwork meant setting firm rules around color treatment, image cropping, and caption style, while still leaving enough room for individual artistic voice to come through in the paintings.
user testing
Because the target audience is genuinely mixed families and children visiting the garden, alongside adult club members and researchers testing focused on two things: whether font sizes worked across age groups (legible for a child, not condescending for an adult), and whether the book gave readers enough to do, not just read. That second question is what pushed activities and interactive prompts (like following Madhu's trail) into the final structure, rather than leaving it as a pure reference text.
Cover design
The cover leads with photography rather than illustration real images from the garden, edited and color-treated to feel premium rather than snapshot like. The title typography is embossed, giving the cover a tactile, field-guide weight in hand, while the photo-led approach signals from the shelf that this is a real place, not a generic nature book.
Pictures from the book launch
