Codebreaker Charlotte 

Cedar, Wang, Codebreaker Charlotte, Clavis. 2024 (English version).2022(Dutch version)

KEY COLOURS COMPETITION 2021 Silver award

Charlotte lives in Cambridge and loves to play codebreaking games. On her ninth birthday, her great-grandmother prepares a code-breaking trip full of surprises for her. As she travels around beautiful Cambridge, solving one puzzle after another, Charlotte learns more about her great-grandmother's past. It turns out that she was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War ......

The work is done digitally to simulate the effect of printmaking, and I have chosen a limited but expressive range of colours. I used two different colour palettes to differentiate between the "present" and "past" timelines.

When I worked on the story, I consulted many sources about Bletchley Park and the life of female codebreakers, such as movies, books, and news reports. Several simple cipher games were inserted into the book to add to the fun of reading for children. The original intention was to make this history accessible to a broader audience and to spread basic cryptography knowledge to children.