Red Paper Books

Work­ing on this puz­zle book right now. It’s really good fun, using the artist Beccy Blake again because I know I’ll she will do a great job. Hope­fully we can keep the bud­get down with thought­ful reuse of her illustrations.

It will be sold straight into out­lets like The Works. Funny how I used to sup­pose that if any of my books ended up some­where like that they had reached the end of their shelf-life. No offence.

Work­books for Grade 1 (and then Grade 2) cov­er­ing addi­tion & sub­trac­tion, phon­ics, time & money, and vocab­u­lary. They may look sim­ple but they were really fid­dly, exas­per­ated some­what by edi­to­r­ial rewrites in the face of the tight­est sched­ule ever. We worked over much of Christ­mas to get these done. But they were fun, and the artists were both blaz­ingly fast!

Thanks also to Jane Walker at QED for rush­ing me some gratis copies from the US in time for the Lon­don Inter­na­tional Book Fair.

Grade 1 artist: Bill Bolton

Sam­ple pages:

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Illus­tra­tion: Beccy Blake

A quick A5 the­atre flyer designed for Deaf­i­nitely The­atre/Tri­cy­cle The­atre.

We designed this flyer, work­ing with the artist Beccy Blake. The title let­ter­ing was cre­ated using the Berliner Grotesk type­face, mak­ing the infant ‘a’ out of the ‘o’ and ‘l’ let­ters, as infant let­ters were appro­pri­ate for the tar­get audi­ence age group. The rest of the type was set in Bad­ger.

The Boy and the Statue is a new play for 4–7 year olds, acces­si­ble to both deaf and hear­ing audiences.

Sat­ur­day 3rd July
11.30am and 2pm
£6 / £5
Box Office 020 7328 1000
Tri­cy­cle, 269 Kil­burn High Rd, Lon­don, NW6 7JR

Cov­ers from the 7 reader books we designed for Pear­son Edu­ca­tion. Pen­guin Active Read­ers are pub­lished inter­na­tion­ally and fea­ture a wide range of gen­res in UK and Inter­na­tional Eng­lish for ELT. Cov­ers are usu­ally by the artists, but some­times use stock pho­tos or clas­sic paint­ings or prints.

Artists: Mike McK­eever (Mon­key King), Katie Mac (Good Day, Bad Day), Adam Hunter Peck (Sto­ries of Other Worlds), Nick Hard­cas­tle (Bleak House), Sonia Kretch­mar (Under the Bridge).

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Although I like see­ing fin­ished art­work when it comes in, I get more excited ear­lier in the process, on receipt of roughs. I think it is because though the final art­work is usu­ally very accom­plished it is in the roughs that the drafts­man­ship can be seen.

So here are a few recent examples:

Nick Hard­cas­tle:

Bleak House

Bleak House

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Sto­ries of Other Worlds cover art­work: Adam Hunter Peck

Part of the Pen­guin Active Read­ers series for 2010, pub­lished by Pear­son Edu­ca­tion. Three short sto­ries by H.G. Wells: The Coun­try of the Blind, The Door in the Wall, The Young Ghost, illus­trated respec­tively by Adam Hunter Peck, Mike Lacey, and Jamel Akib. (more…)

This is a buy-in from an Aus­tralian pub­lisher. The orig­i­nal was in mono with incon­sis­tent typog­ra­phy. But the text was good, so rights were bought and we were asked to repack­age the book with Firecrest’s art­work to pro­duce new lay­outs. An Ein­stein bof­fin char­ac­ter is used to raise issues and medi­ate the learning.

(The © water­mark is not art of the design! LOL)

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Aba­cus Evolve is a ver­sa­tile and cus­tomiz­able maths course pro­duced by Heine­mann. We worked on the inter­ac­tive teach­ing resources, ie. white­board pre­sen­ta­tions. They used Eas­iteach soft­ware from RM (Research Machines) which allowed easy onscreen manip­u­la­tion of objects, draw­ing, writ­ing in front of the whole class on inter­ac­tive white­boards by teacher or pupils. Eas­iteach was pre­ferred over Pow­er­Point because it is so easy for the teacher to adapt on-the-fly in response to the class.

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Cov­ers and sam­ple spreads from the 2nd stage/level of Oxford Read­ing Tree Snap­drag­ons. We were com­mis­sioned to pro­duce 60 titles, in 10 lev­els or stages, using a wide vari­ety of artists, type­faces, lay­outs and for­mats to moti­vate and stim­u­late read­ers. Though clearly lev­eled to pro­vide a pro­gres­sion through the series, each title had to be an inter­est­ing book to pick-up and read for its own sake.

Artists: Andy Peters, David Mostyn, Jess Mikhail, Judy Brown, Lizzie Fin­lay, Liz Pichon

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Lav­ish fold-out books describ­ing ani­mals and plants in their habi­tats. We have begun the sec­ond book which cov­ers the Ever­glades. A beau­ti­ful fold-out spread pic­tures the flora and fauna of the habi­tat, and sub­se­quent pages work through each exam­ple. These designs were done for the Bologna and Frank­furt book fairs. We are now work­ing on them for pub­li­ca­tion in the USA.

Day fold-out ©Firecrest Pub­li­ca­tions 2009