Red Paper Books

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:

Load­ing Images

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).

Load­ing Images

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

more »

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)

more »

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.

more »

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

Snap­drag­ons is part of the ever expand­ing Oxford Read­ing Tree (ORT) from Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press. Usu­ally ORT book sto­ries cen­tre around the Biff and Chip char­ac­ters, with con­sis­tent art­work and type. Not so the Snap­drag­ons branch of the tree. 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: Jan McCaf­ferty, Sue Hen­dra, Jim Kavanagh, Joanne Par­tis, Ian Cun­liffe, Colin Mier

more »

Goal! is a read­ing scheme with a foot­ball theme for less able read­ers want­ing some­thing inter­est­ing to read. These are work­books that accom­pany the series.

A fun take on comic book super-heroes, and a good read too. Orig­i­nally 6, now 12, graphic nov­els done in a manga style. These read­ers are aimed at older chil­dren need­ing help with read­ing who would be put-off by books writ­ten for younger read­ers. Ran­som are par­tic­u­larly good at this sort of stim­u­lat­ing read, as is fur­ther demon­strated by their Goal! series.

The artist is Peter Richard­son. He works in Illus­tra­tor, and his art­work is easy for a designer to work with, as the files are highly editable and adapt­able for con­struct­ing pre­lim and cover pages, as well as being eas­ily uti­lized for par­tic­u­lar excerpts in worbooks.

more »