Punch Bowl Design

This title is the follow-up to the hugely successful Pirates published a year before. To tie the two titles together, the jacket design is a simple reworking of the black Jolly Roger – used on the first book – into a striking red Jack Rackham flag.

The overarching aim of the internal design is to make each spread as evocative of the era as possible.

Plenty of textures and splatter help add extra flavour to the biographical stories of each pirate featured.

This series was initially published for the education market, but a re-design of the jackets was needed for trade publication. A simple layout was devised to work for the topics covered in each book whilst maintaining a strong series look.

In developing the design, it became apparent that a backdrop of black – the colour of space – could add dramatic effect as well as set this series apart from the competition in the trade.

Carlton’s “Experience” titles are highly illustrated hard cover books packaged in a box, with removable facsimile memorabilia on most spreads. This box jacket was designed to express the romance and adventure of exploration as well as feature famous explorers.

The themes evoked by the jacket were carried through to the internals by using printed textures and design elements such as map borders and compass roses.

The typography was kept simple and uncluttered to enhance the experience for the reader.

The Whittington is a large north London hospital trust. The open brief simply requested that the annual review be produced with a minimum budget and be of practical use to the reader.

Modelled on various miscellany publications popular at the time, this review also included many factoids about health issues as well as a telephone directory of all the departments throughout the vast hospital trust. It was widely praised by the community for its accessibility and usefulness.

Extreme Dinosaurs

Final hi-res illustration for this jacket was created following the low-res mock-up the client had produced. The dramatic eye and claws were Photoshop generated as suitable images couldn’t be found.

Extreme Animals

Following on from the involvement with Extreme Dinosaurs jacket, the design of this jacket was to evolve an emerging series of ‘Extreme’ books. This project took initial design roughs through to final hi-res press-ready artwork.

Working closely with the publishers, a series style was established for the inaugural title, and this style has been applied to each new title in the series.

The consistent use of striking full bleed imagery, simple typography and an identifying colour bar have built a successful jacket brand image for these titles.

Strong photography is a constant feature of d4daisy books, so the spreads are designed to take full advantage of these images whilst remaining easy to read.

The practical nature of the topics covered often require cross referencing within the copy, so various call out devices have been designed to assist the reader to find the information they need.

The use of colour is very important to the readership of these books, so it is a strong design feature throughout all the titles in the series.

The brief was to design the pages of this book to enable the young reader to “dip in” anywhere. Using a library of still images supplied by Aardman, the two characters of Wallace and Gromit appear on each spread.

The two characters interacted with the fact based content in a humorous way. Spreads were designed with dummy speech bubble text that was added at final stages by a comedy writer.

This book was produced for sales to co-edition partners using a 5th black ink for all the text. Here the text is reversed out of the special black to dramatic effect.

Following a rough layout supplied by the client, the hi-res artwork was produced. Most of the page elements such as sticky tape, note pages etc were created for the project.

Careful attention to details such as shadows and weathered textures helped to bring together the multiple elements into a cohesive scrapbook effect.

Knights: Where ever possible, simple layouts featuring one main image were used to add drama to the spreads.

Ancient Greeks: Distressed textures were used as a visual flavour across all the titles of this series evoking a sense of old-world atmosphere for the young reader.

Romans: Panels of call out text add visual interest by separating feature text from the bulk of the text.

Samurai: Clear and simply annotation extend the learning experience.

Photoshop techniques were used thoroughly and expertly to create this high impact and textural cover.

Hellish hounds: Colours were manipulated and enhanced on each feature image to gain the high visual complexity.

Dark destroyers: Effective shadows and highlights were added to visually lift three dimensional objects off the page.

Half human, half beast!: The soft pencil sketches were enhanced in such a way to increase their visual strength on the spreads but also to maintain the subtle tones and textures of this art medium.

An authoritative montage of images was needed to capture the richness and theatrical drama of the Napoleonic Wars. Whilst featuring the three main personalities of the era, the cover also offers a close-up aspect of the experience of the ordinary foot soldier.

Call out panels were designed using textiles and clothing of the day. They followed a colour code to signify the person featured in the text: red for the military, blue for the aristocracy and grey for politicians.

The body text was kept to two columns on the verso page, thus allowing extra space on each spread to feature the lush imagery including expansive battle paintings, beautiful archival pieces and intricate replica objects.

Given that the source images for this title were predominately black and white and sepia in tone, colour was introduced effectively through the use of the red poppy and calendar date for each spread.

Elements such as torn pages and extracts from diaries were used in the design to evoke a more personal story of warfare.

The colour of the more modern imagery toward the end of the book was slightly subdued to better align with the heritage aspect of the black and white image content of the rest of the book.

A simple, bold and colourful series design looking at common farm animals for early child readers.

The internals included educational farm facts and craft activities. The series initially started with Sheep, Chickens, Pigs and Cows then continued by the publisher to include Fish and Ducks

Health services are always measured by their statistics. This hospital annual report actually draws on its statistical data as a key design feature both on the cover and the internal of the broadsheet-sized report.

This higher education title for the Australian market has a highly colourful front cover motif sitting striking on a black cover. The graphic element is repeated on the inside of the two-colour internal used effectively to break the text heavy content.

The koala and kookaburra became strong visual identifiers for the junior school dictionaries and thesauruses. Both images work sympathetically with the existing Macquarie Dictionary gum leaf logo.

A lime green background was introduced to the thesauruses cover banners to strengthen the Macquarie brand. The pocket thesaurus and pocket dictionary will stand strong together on any household bookshelf.

A new simple and clean series design to launch the 2011 Australian Curriculum science content for high school students from grade 7 to 10.

Science Quest Series covers, 7, 8, 9 & 10 draw on strong nature imagery with vibrant colour difference to distinguish the school year level. An emboss finish will be applied to the title.

A higher education title that uses dynamic images and engaging colour palette to enliven what is traditionally a very conservative subject.

This is a cheeky and fun gift market book choc-full of colour and brashness.

The design process for the internals of this book included the creation of different background patterns for each page. Luckily the vector illustrations by Melbourne based Pinglet were inspirational and fantastic to work with.

This brief asked for a concise and clear website that would visually represent Causeway, their professionalism and showcase their work.

Client testimonials appear along side the showcased design work. The portfolio examples sit cleanly on a simple white background and the user can toggle through a selection of work using the base arrows.

Support images and typography use the corporate colour orange. The palette is restricted to minimal colours to maximise the impact of Causeway’s brand.

This bright and in-your-face kids series is about animals raised in captivity. Each spread shows conservation information about each critter and where in the world they can be found in the wild.

High impact images were sourced from a combination of both royalty free and rights managed image libraries. Working to a tight image budget often meant that some creative image sourcing was used to get just the right image.

The viewfinder back of the digital camera was introduced as an image border to suggest that in zoos the reader could personally capture images and therefore extend their own learning process.

The call out panels for Zoo Stars describes famous zoo animals from around the world that had captured the hearts of people either through media attention.

Effective colourful borders – montages of leaves, ferns, corals and branches – were created for all four books in the series. This layered border helped hold the spreads cohesively together and set the scene.

Trade books compete on both bookshop shelves and as thumbnails on online bookstores. They need to capture the eye and make bookstore browsers select for a closer look or online buyers click a link for a closer look inside.

The idea behind the Dinosaur Dig series is that each book was to simulate a notebook from an archaeological dig site. To that end, various page elements such as paper clips, note paper, label tags, sello tape etc were used in the page design to evoke the feeling of a scrapbook for the younger reader.

Informative graphics were used at the start of each book to introduce the concept of how sedimentary rock and archaeological digs can reveal the story of time.

Each main dinosaur featured on a spread had a scale panel to show it’s size in comparison to a human adult.

Each spread featured a small world map panel to show where the fossils had been discovered.

Small Mammals: this title featured a footprint motif for each animal to help the budding wildlife watcher identify animals by their tracks.

Birds: thought bubbles were used to pose questions about each species showcased, these questions could be used to identify the differences between each species.

Insects: a warning box was designed to draw attention to possible dangers when observing wildlife up close.

Plants: appropriate stock library photographs were chosen as backgrounds for each spread. They helped form a contextual environment to the featured animals and plants.