Izzi Playground

An illustrated learning world for the youngest grades, rebuilt from the ground up. Every screen hand-drawn, every interaction made to delight a child still finding their feet.

Playground is a separate product in the Izzi family, built for school grades 1 to 5. Where Bookshelf is clean and utilitarian, Playground is a fully illustrated world: every interface, button, and interactive element is custom artwork. I rebuilt it from the ground up along with the vast majority of illustrated assets and UI.

The starting point was a charming idea trapped in a product that didn't work. No design system, assets made by graphic designers with no UI background, a different look on every screen. And the audience is children whose reading is still finding its feet, so the interface has to communicate through illustration, motion, and color first, not labels and menus.

It started with the visual language. I rebuilt Playground's illustrated style from scratch, drawn to work as interface rather than decoration: a world that feels handmade and alive to a child, but behaves like a real system underneath, so every new screen builds on the same footing.

The home, reimagined as a place rather than a list. Content sits inside an illustrated landscape, organized by grade and class, with a custom environment for each one. A child navigates by recognizing pictures and scrolling, not by reading menus. It's the front door, and it had to feel like somewhere worth being.

E-Gradivo is the library, the direct route into the reading content. Same job as the Bookshelf shelf, but reskinned as a physical cartoon shelf that scrolls vertically through the world. A tangible object a young user understands at a glance.

The game player runs Playground's interactive challenges, and it's where the gamification lives: progress, scoring, and a reward system that keeps a young player moving. Animated characters supplied by different countries drop straight into it. I built it to travel, so a variant later ran inside Bookshelf too. One player, two products.

Flipbook is the interactive reader, redrawn so it feels like part of the world instead of a plain tool sitting inside it. New navigation, new controls, all on the same illustrated language. The reader I'd point to as proof of what the format could be.

Playground shipped as a fully illustrated learning world for grades 1 to 5, rebuilt from a rough, system-less start into something coherent. The home, the library, the player, sub-pages, and the reader all share one visual language, drawn to work as interface.