What's happening in our world

Surviving change

2013-11-12T11:42:00.002+13:00

There's been plenty of change lately but just look at how books have survived from where they first started. Thank goodness for the book designer we say.

The upheaval in the book trade has meant hard times for everyone. With our workloads a bit lighter we have kept ourselves busy and ahead of the game by reading. There is heaps of it to be done. Changes in ebooks and with Creative Suite have meant we now have the technology as designers to offer way more services than ever before. Do ask us before heading off to someone else for help with animation, video and interactive graphics. This round-up from Books in Browsers is a good guide for where we are heading for the future.

Digital publications are now part of our daily production and it's a real pleasure to produce an ebook that values the readers experience. Whether this be in a fixed or reflowable format or an app. The look of your book design is tops and the main element for portraying quality. We have our head around digital covers and can help guide you with innovations in ebook marketing and how to design an ebook wrapper.

images here with links through to portfolio on website that opens in a new window.

We have had a go and entered an ebook title that we recently designed for Scholastic NZ in the Digital Design Books Awards (part of the Digital Book World Conference in New York). Who knows if it will get anywhere. But sometimes you just have to give things a go.

Buy an ebook and enjoy the experience

2013-08-21T17:16:00.000+12:00

Check out our ebook designs at the couple of links below for Scholastic NZ books now on Amazon.

"Why should I do that," I can hear you asking.

Well, that's because we have designed them. Now that's a big difference from 'produced' them. We've been blabbing on for ages about how we can 'produce' an ebook for you, which, of course we can do. But what we want to do is design an ebook for you.

When I compare these files with any of the ebooks I have been reading recently, they rock and really give the reader an experience. Judge this for yourself by clicking on the books above and you'll quickly see the difference.

A reader still wants an experience when they are reading, whether that's an ebook or a print book. Our aim is to create one for them.

Next — ebook marketing. We're also working on book trailers and how to get your ebook out there. Design has so moved on from the static image. But a book will always be a book.

Interactive PDF's, animated GIF's and book trailers?

2013-07-29T13:48:00.000+12:00

Book trailers and animated gifs. Technology is wonderful and has advanced to the point where you don’t need to use an expensive developer to create your animated gifs and book trailers. If we’ve produced your book, then all the assets we need to create these are already at hand. If you are looking for a cost-effective option like this, then do ask us more.

Anne has had a blast with the personal profiles for our website, which gives you an idea of what we can do. It's all in the imagination.

Interactive pdf's for educational workbooks. We’ve been asked by some of our educational publishers if we can make their workbooks digital. It would be great, they tell us, if students could work directly on screen to fill in worksheets, then email these back to their teachers. Teachers could then mark and comment on the worksheets and send them back to the students. Can it be done? Absolutely.

This interactive pdf is an easy solution that we can customise to your needs. Feel free to download this dummy version and have a play.

... and this is just the beginning. Do challenge us and see if we can help with your next big idea.

Hot off the press — designs to impress

2013-07-26T17:27:00.003+12:00

Here's a handful of recent projects that we have designed both the covers and internals. There's heaps more that we have worked from a clients template or just completed the internals. We can help you in oh-so-many ways.

The third title we have completed by the Topp Twins and Jenny Cooper for Scholastic NZ.

An ebook that matches the design of the successful print book. Our cover design and all.

192 page, 4 colour book for New Holland. Watch out for it in your bookshop soon.

A picture book for Batemans with Errol McLeary.

Pleroma Press have published Joy Cowley's Notes to a Friend as an ebook. We love this fixed layout design.

There's also been a couple of great new titles from Huia.

The Easter Story started life as a print book and now has a digital partner.

Craig Smith is teaming with Scott Tulloch for his next book. Watch out for this before Christmas.

Introducing Carolyn Lewis

2013-07-23T16:43:00.000+12:00

Whenever I see a gorgeous book on the shelf I pick it up and immediately look inside to see who the designer was. So many times that designer has been Carolyn Lewis.
When we first opened the Auckland studio, Carolyn sent in her CV. 'Goodie!' was my first thought, but it wasn't quite that easy; it took a couple more years and a baby for Carolyn before she was able to come and join our team.

Here's a peek at some of the work from her portfolio; we'll post her future work on our Facebook page. It will be worth keeping an eye out for.

Email Carolyn at carolyn@bookdesign.co.nz or see her page on our website.

Introducing Rachel Clark

2013-07-22T18:02:00.000+12:00

Rachel captured our attention straight away when she answered our 'Help Wanted' ad with this clever advertisement. It was so out there, and really made her stand out from the crowd. Just what we were wanting in a designer.

Rachel trained in Washington DC to gain her BA in Graphic Design and Photography and then moved on to New York to put her skills to the test as a packaging designer.

In the six weeks she has been with us her new ideas and fresh approaches have continued to impress. She sits quietly, listens, takes in everyones needs and then shares her balanced opinion. It's just been great. Check out her personal website if you'd like to see more, but I also need to share these great competition posters she's just created for the Storylines festival. There was very little brief and no images supplied — very clever!

Email Rachel's at rachel@bookdesign.co.nz or see her page on our website

Ebooks — here's how we can help

2013-07-15T15:27:00.000+12:00

If you are starting with a print book, then we make sure the designs and files can easily be adapted for their ebook partner, either now or in the future. The nature of the content will help steer the choice between a flowable epub file or a fixed layout.

The design process is about making things look good, and about helping readers capture a visual representation of the words they are reading.

The process isn’t as scary as you might think. We are still using InDesign as our main layout software, and the proofing process is exactly the same; it's just at the finished art stage that we need to choose the pathway — pbook or ebook. Do we convert the file to a high-resolution printable pdf or do we create a fixed or flowable epub?

We have updated and tweaked our in-house InDesign workflow, so we can create clean CSS for every file. It’s all in the way we set things up, and the advantages are that you can choose to go down either the print book or ebook pathway whenever it suits you. Your files are already set to go.

When you go for an ebook, don’t forget about cover design; it still needs to look good, although the focus is very different from a print book. An ebook cover is often viewed at thumbnail size and the buyer will probably only look at it when choosing a book. The rest of the time the cover is not viewed. But if the concept of the cover is changed to a ‘cover wrapping’, incorporating the marketing of other titles in the end-matter, it offers extra opportunities.

Book Design isn’t just a design company, it is an exciting team of people with expert knowledge and an eye on the horizon. My business focuses on emerging trends in leadership so I particularly value Kim’s quest for knowledge and thirst to be on the cutting edge, particularly in the ebook field. Dr Cheryl Doig, July 2013

Every project is different. If you’d like some help, drop us a line.

New Profiles

2013-06-14T06:51:00.000+12:00

Anne's been at it again and is continuing to create our new profile animated gifs for both our websites.
Here's the ones for the Christchurch crew. You'll all know Kim, but Trudy maybe a new face for some. She's our wonderful accounts lady who keeps Kim company and on task Monday to Thursday.

Kim almost looks like she's dancing.

I think Trudy will always be known as money bags now.

The next ones will be for our two new staff members who have just joined us in the last week. Carolyn and Rachel. Watch this space ...

Our Ode to Maria

2013-05-28T08:00:00.000+12:00

Our Maria – how she has grown.

It is with very sad faces that we share the news of Maria leaving us this week. She is off on her big OE.

We know it's something that everyone needs to do, but the loss of her smile and skill to our studio will be hard to replace. Maria is the last member of our Christchurch design team and without her wonderful support it is hard to imagine how we would have survived the big move and transition to Auckland.

Maria applied for a Mac Op position in the same year that she finished studying at Nat Col. Her CV stood out from the crowd like a shining light, one that I will never forget. She had taken the time to look at our website and find a connection to our team with a photograph accompanying her application that said 'Hire Me'. How could you not give the girl an interview.

Her organizational skills stood out very early on as she tackled a 140 book educational versioning project and then a huge 800+ page soup book. These were just a warm-up for the next 3 years. Maria has tackled a branding and curriculum upgrade over 3 levels that would make many people's hair turn grey at the thought. In scrolling through the emails just now I saw lots of comments like 'excellent Maria, thanks once again', 'we really appreciate you keeping us informed' and 'great work'.

Our problem though was that she was very quickly out growing her Mac Op role and needed to get her teeth into some real design.

As studio manager, I was really reluctant to lose or distract Maria from the great role that she was doing. Her colleagues urged me to rethink and give her more of a challenge, to let her grow, they'd help, they said. Wow, thank goodness I listened.

Maria's growth is one that I have found extraordinary to watch. I feel so privileged to have her as part of our team (I can't use the word 'had', as I really don't want her departure to arrive). During the earthquakes, Maria was living on the west side of Christchurch, so she had power/water and was the only one who was able to keep the company operating. While most of our clients were understanding and happy to wait - there is always one who would like to 'but'. Maria just did it. We got the files off our server (actually, I think we just gave her the whole server) and she put it all together, while we were all putting our lives back together.

In August 2011 Maria packed up her car and joined her good friend and fellow designer Sarah for the big shift to Auckland. It was her first time away from home and her first time in Auckland. She loved it! For our company, she was our rock. With so many changes and shifting sands, it was Maria who was there to hold it all together. Her knowledge and common sense is so valued and will be missed for a while to come.

I've tried to put together this design story to show Maria's progress over the years. I hope you can see her growth as much as I can. Do look right to the bottom to see what she is working on this week as a fitting end to the pinnacle of her career with Book Design. To any new employer, firstly, please, we want her back. Secondly, you are lucky enough to gain one of the best people I have ever been lucky enough to employ. Our very best wishes Maria, we so look forward to watching your future journey.

Please feel free to add a comment and leave Maria a message.

Beattie's Book Blog - unofficial homepage of the New Zealand book community: Ann Patchett: 'Authors Need to Get Involved'

2013-05-23T10:12:00.001+12:00

Beattie's Book Blog - unofficial homepage of the New Zealand book community: Ann Patchett: 'Authors Need to Get Involved': Shelf Awareness "If you had asked me two years ago, I would not have thought it was my responsibility. But I do think authors need ...

Exciting ebooks with Anne Luo

2013-05-06T12:35:00.001+12:00

Life has been interesting and sometimes challenging in the studio recently as we push forward with the ever-changing ebook/digital format options for producing books.

More and more the printed page is no longer the final word, we are now being asked to produce books that have an additional life as an eBook, interactive PDF, fixed layout or flowable ePub, to name a few!

Thanks to some real advances with the latest versions of Creative Suite, and streamlining of how we set up our InDesign files we are now (if you listen to Adobe’s marketing) only one click away from producing an ePub file and a beautiful ebook…yeah. This is where we have conquered the most challenges. Our 'Book Design' aim has been to keep the same level of design that goes into a print book coming through to the ebook, e.g. chapter headings, type design, page breaks, text spacing, wrapping, tables etc (we don't want our ebooks looking like digitised manuscripts) and then get the file through the validation process. There are speed bumps here that need fixing.

Other valuable assets that an ebook has or can have are navigational and local table of contents, searchable content, use of live hyperlinks, inclusion of sound and video, etc. These also all need to work and validate to enhance the readers’ experience. Which is totally what our aim is.

I learnt the secrets of cracking open the epub and editing the codes in toc.ncx and content.opf files (two of most important files in an epub that control just about EVERYTHING). They looked like headaches at the start but got easier and more familiar the more I did. By the time I’d edited, zipped and unzipped, previewed and ran validation tests many, many (and many more) times the validation result was 'Congratulations! No problems were found'. HOORAY!!!

That was the biggest challenge completed, getting the validation problem-free. From here I could move to uploading an ebook to an online reseller. For this we developed an interactive Metadata form with all the questions needed to make the uploading process smooth and easy.

There are a variety of ebook formats out there and each suits a different type of book. Fixed-layout ebooks are a relatively new kind of ePub. Someone said it is like a hybrid of a PDF with complete control of the pages and a flowable ePub which is an open-source format of digital books. Unlike normal flowable ePubs in which the content flows on in page dimensions and fonts determined by end user devices, we have complete control over the design and page layout in fixed-layout ebooks. The text is alive and searchable in fixed-layout just as in a flowable ePub. We can achieve text sitting on top of images without rasterizing the whole page to a flattened image, like you’d have to do for flowable ePubs. This format is great for children's pictures books, and any books with content-specific layout where text and images need to stay at certain positions.

To achieve these advantages it requires a lot more work cracking the codes in HTML base programs like Dreamweaver, but in many cases it's definitely worth the effort, and the possibilities for this format are very exciting.

We also had a recent project requiring a new level of communication with client returnable interactive PDF forms. These are more advanced than the interactive PDFs we have made in the past, with form fields, clickable internal links and external hyperlinks. Adobe Reader 8 and later users can fill in and save PDF files locally, and send these back to the author electronically. This makes data communication much faster, easier and fun too. You just type an answer directly on the file page and hit the send button.

This great ability with PDF forms can bring many other projects to the next level. For example, educational books now can have fillable write-on-line and comments fields in an electronic PDF version. Teachers and students who use free Adobe Reader can fill out their answers and comments and send to each other by email. Simple.

So we keep learning, keep learning and keep learning. The more we do, the easier it gets.

Perhaps one day it will be just one click of a button to produce any of the above. But not yet, and that is where we are here to help.

Trade ebooks

2013-04-29T15:37:00.000+12:00

Life has just gotten very exciting with Scholastic NZ releasing their first locally published ebook ... all with the help of our services.

New Zealand cover

Australian cover

A Winter's Day in 1939 debuted in print for the both the NZ and Australia market and is now available on Amazon.

It is really important to us that our ebooks capture the same pleasurable reading experience of the printed book and we have proudly captured the main design elements in this digital format. Here's what Scholastic have to say

Animated gifs

2013-02-27T10:28:00.000+13:00

Anne has been playing and has made these new stop motion animated gifs for our new profiles that will feature on our website.

They are so cool though that I just had to show them off here first.

Dexter Fry - he promised that no books where damaged in this process

Anne Luo - our wonderful digital creative

Our secretive Maria - you just have to watch out for this girl

It's great the new features that we can now include in ebooks and all sorts of multi-media. Just ask us, we can do all sorts of things ... and yes the team did have as much fun as it looks like they did creating these. Go guys!

Congratulations Nic's Cookbook, International award winner

2013-02-25T15:55:00.001+13:00

Once again we are blown away by where a book can take you. A big congratulations to Scholastic, Nic and Nic's mum.

The fun Nic had putting this book together just jumps right out of the pages, which always makes design so much fun too. See the press release from Scholastic below with all the book news.

NIC’S COOKBOOK WINS INTERNATIONAL AWARD

Scholastic New Zealand is delighted to announce that Nic’s Cookbook, written by ten-year-old Nicholas Brockelbank, has won the Best Fundraising, Charity and Community Cookbook category of the strongly contested Gourmand World Cookbook Awards for the Pacific region.

His win was announced at the Paris Cookbook Fair on Saturday 23 February.

Nic’s Cookbook was the New Zealand winner in two categories announced December 2012: the Best Fundraising, Charity and Community Cookbook and the Best Children and Family Cookbook.

Previous New Zealand recipients of awards have included Annabel Langbein, Brett McGregor and Jo Seagar.

Nic lives with muscular dystrophy and is the 2012–2013 ambassador for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). He and Scholastic NZ are donating half of the royalties from sales of this book to the MDA.

Nic started cooking at eight years old when one of his teachers suggested it might help with his schoolwork. He has since shown significant improvements in reading, spelling and maths.

Nic’s Cookbook was born from Nic creating his own ‘cookbooks’, which were photocopied booklets of his favourite recipes that he sold to family and friends to raise money for charities.

In 2011, he went on to win the TVNZ Good Morning Kids’ Cook Off with his Chicken and Broccoli Pasta recipe, which features in the cookbook.

Since the publication of his book in October 2012, Nic has held a sell-out book launch, made guest appearances on TVNZ Saturday Breakfast, What Now and Attitude TV, and done Whitcoulls in-store cooking demonstrations, assisted by celebrity chefs Simon Gault and Brett McGregor.

Nic’s Cookbook has been a regular feature in the top-10 NZ children’s bestseller list.

Bulk re-versioning and templates

2013-02-24T11:06:00.000+13:00

A bright sunny studio, in Birkenhead, Auckland.

The New Zealand dollar is a cost-effective currency for international publishers to get bulk work completed. We run the latest software and have a reputation for being hard-working, innovative thinkers.
Our time difference works well for the US and Australian markets, with our day starting the earliest of them all.

We’ve recently taken 140+ books that were created for the Australian market and re-versioned these for the US market. This involved updating the existing files and taking in changes to the branding on the covers, title and imprint pages. We also made editors’ corrections, searched any images that needed changing for the text, and redesigned the learning activities at the back of the books as directed to make them appropriate for the new market. We then followed these through a proofing and review process before sending them to print and archiving to the publisher’s standard.

As you can imagine, a project of this size is not just about completing the on-screen design work, as it can quickly become a logistical headache if not tracked and managed properly. Our studio manager oversees the process, and all our designers record their time directly into our digital production system. This gives our clients much more control over their projects. They can choose to have one point of contact through our studio manager or work directly with the project designer. And at any time, we can issue progress reports on all the books, enabling everyone to manage time effectively and keep an eye on deadlines.

Another of our current studio projects is in its third year. In the wake of curriculum changes, we have updated the client’s material; the process requires us to meet their system requirements and work to set guidelines and templates. Each booklet requires image searching and the production of graphs, diagrams and maps. We have designed our own in-house system to quote on each individual book and report back fortnightly to the client. In return they send us a priority list to help manage the workflow and keep to their deadlines. It works perfectly and I’m sure they would be happy to talk with you directly if you’d like to hear about our service from a client’s perspective.

As all of the above is covered with confidentiality agreements I can’t show you a pretty picture of our work, so here’s a pic of Dexter, our studio manager, working hard instead. If you would like to know more, contact us.

Dexter Fry our studio manager, looking very serious.

Secondary books

2013-02-24T10:26:00.002+13:00

Two of our recent awards have come from our secondary book designs.

Some books we design from scratch, while with others we may be picking up on an existing design or working in with another designer to complete just one part of the project. Most include a textbook with teachers’ resources, or a workbook supplied as an interactive DVD product or a direct link from a website.
With larger projects like this we are happy to work with your budget or give you a quotation. Some books we design from scratch, while with others we may be picking up on an existing design or working in with another designer to complete just one part of the project. Most include a textbook with teachers’ resources, or a workbook supplied as an interactive DVD product or a direct link from a website. With larger projects like this we are happy to work with your budget or give you a quotation. With larger projects like this we are happy to work with your budget or give you a quotation.

Year 9 Graphics is a print and digital product that won Best Educational Design at the PANZ Book Design Awards. Excellence in Biology Level 3 received a highly commended in 2010. Both books are published by Cengage NZ, for whom we have produced a variety of books over the years. Most of these are four-colour throughout, with lots of graphs, diagrams and tables, and each brings its own set of challenges. Some creative thinking is always required to fit the material into the compact package, yet they all come out looking fantastic and achieve results. It’s a challenge we love.

Early readers

2013-02-21T16:22:00.001+13:00

These usually arrive in bulk and with a wonderful confidentiality clause attached, which means we can’t show you any pretty pictures here. But I can tell you about a three-month contract we completed last year that involved 64 books in 16 groups over three levels.

Our role was to source and commission illustrations for the non-fiction books and image-search across a variety of locations for the fiction books, following editors’ briefs and comments. We created spread designs for approval, then completed the layout to the publisher’s specifications. Once the local publisher had proofed the material, each book was uploaded to an international partner’s production system for review. We took in the corrections and reproofing from this stage before following the publisher’s requirements for finished art, uploading to the offshore printer and archiving.
Our digital production system was perfect for keeping track of a project like this: it enabled us to break each book down into stages, keep a record of all the designers’ time, and track delivery and return dates, so planning deadlines was a simple process.
The pressure was on with this one, so our team expanded for the duration of the contract to make sure we were not lagging behind, and we succeeded. The client was extremely happy with how smoothly the whole process ran.
We love to take on large projects like this, and we can also help with the editing if that would work better for you. We are able to give you detailed reports on progress whenever you require. We can also provide you with either a single point of contact for the whole team, or one-to-one contact directly with the designer, whichever you prefer.

Quaky Cat two years on

2013-02-07T13:12:00.000+13:00

This press release has just come through from Scholastic NZ. One of the great rewards of being book designer's is watching where a book can go. This one is amazing ...

PICTURE BOOK CONTINUES TO COMFORT CHILDREN TWO YEARS AFTER EARTHQUAKES

Two years ago, children’s author Diana Noonan, illustrator Gavin Bishop and Scholastic New Zealand launched a very special picture book, Quaky Cat, which was created in record time in response to the September 2010 earthquakes in Canterbury. At the time, Scholastic gifted 15,500 copies of the book to Christchurch school children.

To date, this remarkable book has raised over $156,000 for Christchurch charities Women’s Refuge, Te Tai Tamariki Children’s Literature Charitable Trust and the Christchurch Earthquake Mayoral Appeal. In July 2012 Scholastic launched it as an App for the iPad, available via iTunes, with proceeds continuing to be donated to charities. For the month of February Scholastic will be offering the App at half its regular price.

With the approach of the second anniversary of the February earthquake, Scholastic’s Upper South Island Territory Manager Lynne Andrews has visited St Paul’s School, previously in Dallington, Christchurch, which received copies of Quaky Cat delivered by Gavin Bishop and Scholastic staff on the day of its launch, to find how the school and its students have fared.

In December 2010, the students of St Paul’s School were being taught in the hall at Cathedral College. By February 2011, the school had moved into an old technology block at the College, proud of their freshly painted classrooms and grateful to be there. After the 22 February earthquake, the school had to relocate again, this time to a disused Ministry of Education property in St Albans, where they remain today.

Their premises in Dallington were red stickered and it was announced last October that the school is proposed to merge with Our Lady of Fatima, which will be the fourth relocation of the school since the earthquakes.

“I take my hat off to these teachers!” says Lynne Andrews. “Students who still attend St Paul’s School are being bussed in from their original suburb of Dallington. The upheaval and turmoil must be immense.”

On the day of the launch of Quaky Cat, a small boy earnestly chose his best pen to write his name on the bookplate of his copy of the book. He and his family have now moved to Dunedin. In the summer of 2010/11, Deputy Principal Damian Young visited school families and was invariably asked to read a story to the children, and much-thumbed copies of Quaky Cat were frequently the book of choice.

This week, speaking to Lynne Andrews, memories of being given Quaky Cat came flooding back to three of the students who are still at St Paul’s School. Sophia remembers ‘the tall man who painted it [telling us] how we all had the brush at home and could do it too – it was a toothbrush!’, while Learna says that ‘you could feel the rumble and the bricks fall on the journey.’ The students shared stories of rabbits and cats going missing, drawing parallels between Quaky Cat’s Tiger, the cat who went missing after the earthquakes, and their own pets. When asked if they still have their copies of the book, the answer was a deafening ‘yes!’, and they are still reading it now. ‘It reminds me of the earthquake,’ says Jade.

The impact of Quaky Cat surpasses the expectations of any of its creators. Far more than a fundraiser, it has provided comfort to children and families who experienced the earthquakes. The book helped them ‘get used to the earthquakes and not to be scared … [it] helps loads of little kids and makes them believe and be safe no matter what,’ says Sophia. ‘It helped me every day.’

‘Whenever I was sad, I picked up Quaky Cat and asked for it to be read to me,’ says Jade. ‘Same,’ adds Learna.

At the time of the book’s launch, no one imagined what was to hit Christchurch on 22 February 2011, but all those involved were thankful that Quaky Cat was there to give comfort to children when the next disaster struck.

For further information, please contact

South Island Territory Manager Lynne Andrews, landrews@scholastic.co.nz

Having fun

2012-11-23T06:18:00.003+13:00

We've been having a bit of fun in the studio in the last couple of weeks, exploring and stretching our designers talents in a different direction.
We all took our cameras and 2 letters from the word BOOK DESIGN, along with a brief to capture the meaning of the word or our business.

Now usually it's really, really hard to drag these guys away from their computers. Lunch breaks are even spent in front of the their screens. On this Friday, they were off. Birkenhead was not sure what hit. 30 mins or so later they drifted back and put our new color printer to the test printing out their shots.

The following Monday it was time to get sticky. We took our oversized letters and cut out the interiors and used our images to create a montage of the essence of BOOK DESIGN. What amazed me was the silence. Within 5 minutes of hitting the cutting table there was not a sound. Everyone was so engrossed in what they were doing. Lead designers to creativity and they are totally captivated. That's why they would normally never leave their screens!

Here's some images of the activity and hopefully you will see the results on our wall soon.

Kim's still here

2012-11-08T15:20:00.000+13:00

With all the changes that have happened I thought I should point out that I am still here! I still live in Christchurch with my family and travel to Auckland on a regular basis to keep in contact with the studio and our clients. Skype just rocks and up until this week I have been able to run the daily workflows in Auckland from my desk in Christchurch. The plan is that Dexter will take over this role now, but I am still very, very much in touch. I'm also not alone here in Christchurch with Cherie to keep me company. My aim is to get out and have much more of a client focus than has been possible in the last few years. My airpoints are looking great and I'm really enjoying the balance between travel and home life. So if you ever have a query or concern (or a really cool project) please don't hesitate to get in touch. I'm always at the end of my phone, whether it's on the email or Facebook. I look forward to seeing or hearing from you soon.

Maths in the Real World

2012-11-08T14:57:00.001+13:00

Just incase you are thinking all our designs are based on beautifully illustrated or gorgeously photographed books, then here's a reality check.

We also complete lots of production work for educational publishers. We are happy to work from existing designs or from templates, but of course we also love to design from the beginning.

Major project work is a speciality of ours and it usually arrives with confidentiality clauses, which means we can't show samples of the work. But, we are very keen to take on really LARGE editing, design and production jobs. Our inhouse production systems are built to handle this type of work and are able to give you detailed reports on progress through a single point of contact directly from our studio.

For a number of years now we have enjoyed working with Cengage here in New Zealand and have produced several full-colour, two-colour and one-colour higher educational books. Some are harder than others, but diagrams, graphs and image searching are all part of our everyday work.

This one, On the Building Site is part of the Maths in the Real World series. Most of the Cengage books have accompanying workbooks and teachers' resources and include interactive DVD material that we also produce.

Joy of the Mountains

2012-11-08T14:30:00.001+13:00

There are some books that just get under your skin and this is really one of them.

John Harrison was a mountaineer in the 1950s, climbing and naming some of New Zealand's highest peaks and exploring in Antarctica and the Himalayas with Hilary and many other amazing men of that time. This story is of those journeys and his life before he was tragically killed in 1966 trying to save others.

The book has been written by John Wilson, who was in the tent with John Harrison when the avalanche on Mount Rolleston took his life. It uses John Harrison's own photographs and drawings which his widow has been saving for years for just this purpose – to remember a remarkable man.

What is really needed now is for a publisher or distributor to pick up the material and take it further than just the mountaineering clubs. Please contact Kim if you are keen.

Do Your Ears Hang Low?

2012-11-08T14:07:00.000+13:00

How do you tell that adorable face, that yes, his ears do hang low? This is the second book that Jenny Cooper has illustrated with the Topp Twins and just like the first one, the song does get stuck in your head.

We were wobbling to and fro' all around the studio as we clear cut all of Jenny's wonderful illustrations to put in the colour backgrounds behind EACH image. Actually I should say each HAIR (as in, Jeez Jen! did you have to make the animals so hairy?)

It was all worth it though, and the launch in Nelson with a Topp Twins concert was just a blast! Another occasion to be really lucky to be doing the job that we do. Thanks so much to the Scholastic team for giving us the opportunity.

Here's the link to our Facebook page if you would like to see some images of the launch.

The Heart of our Game

2012-11-08T13:43:00.000+13:00

Maria and Lisa worked really hard to produce two books with Bill Honeybone from HarperCollins for their Christmas list.

The Heart of our Game, 160 pages full of players and personalities in New Zealand rugby, just in time for Christmas, by Steve Hale. The cover banner was Bill's idea and we really think it was a goodie!

The other was The Kiwi Fisherman's Guide to Life by Ian Chapman and Mike Rendle.

Both in coffee-table format with heaps of great images.

Nic's Cookbook

2012-11-08T13:21:00.001+13:00

Nic really has been cooking up a storm. The proceeds of this book are being donated to Muscular Dystrophy. Nic suffers from this condition and he is not letting it get in his way. Since the books release in early October Nic has been travelling around doing lots of cooking demonstrations and having a blast.

The inside pages are colourful and simple with clear instructions that are easy to read. My children have even tried them out and are impressed. This book would make a great Christmas present and I'm sure Lisa was thinking of her nieces and nephews when she designed it.

We have our fingers crossed that this might open some doors, and that we get to design more books just like this.

Published by the wonderful team at Scholastic.