Evaluation of primary education level course books in Turkey with regard to visual design

Course books are resources gathered by designing visuals with scientific contents of branches different from each other. The fact that primary education level is comprised of varying age groups requires a conscious approach regarding the visual design of textbooks. Apart from this course books contribute to the esthetic perception and artistic development of students with their visual contents. In this paper, a comprehensive literature screening was conducted on all studies related directly or indirectly with the visual design of primary education textbooks. According to this, the absence of a visual design application in most of the studies related with textbooks was observed. It is aimed to overcome the deficiency in this field to some extent with page designs and visual guides prepared for the common pages of the textbooks. Moreover, millions of course books are published in Turkey yearly turning into waste products at the end of the year. It was observed that an environmentally sensitive textbook is possible by using recycled paper on the pages of the course book prepared as an example for this study. Along with this, the Turkish course books used as samples were examined under the topics of typographic layout, visual order, page setup and pedagogical relevance.