Millbrook Press

a new literary diet plan

graphic design blog, musings

Want to lose your appetite? May I suggest reading about guinea worms before lunch. Here’s a book that can help you:

9780761386339fc

(I can take no credit for the cover design, that was done by my talented friend and colleague Amelia, but I did take her splotchy cover design and adapt it to the interior layout. Here are a few spreads:)

Zombiespreads

I’m in no way saying this is a healthy diet plan, just that it helps you lose your appetite.

The guinea worm. A parasite. Say you’re really thirsty and live in a place where your water is not filtered nor treated. You drink water from streams or lakes, and little do you know that you’re drinking guinea worm larva too. The larva you drink works its way through your digestive system, somehow making its way into your leg. Over the course of about a year, it grows, maybe even up to 3 feet long. One day the worm realizes it needs to escape the host body (yours) into water to propagate, so it starts to force a way out of your skin, causing horrible sores that are calmed by being in the cooling properties of water. This makes you head to water. The worm then escapes your body and completes its life cycle by creating more larvae to infect other hosts.

Sometimes I’m just really glad I live in a town with clean and treated water.

The guinea worm is only one sort of critter that can cause zombie-like behavior in living (or dead or soon to be dead) creatures. This is an excellent read, but caution you against reading it before a meal. Unless you’re trying to not eat that meal.

And here’s a bit of a behind the scenes extra in the life of a publishing house—designer notes on a 1st pages proof of Zombie Makers:

zombiebonus

(can’t tell you that children’s book publishing biz isn’t sometimes fun)

from the top of the world

graphic design blog

Here’s something I’ve designed recently—Tales from the Top of the World, a book about climbing Mount Everest, focusing on the experiences of ‘Mr. Everest’ Pete Athans. Reading this book will simultaneously make you:
1. want to Climb Mount Everest
2. never ever ever want to climb Mount Everest
3. have immense respect for those who have attempted and accomplished this feat.

I kept the layout fairly simple to show off the photography, aiming for a high-quality magazine feel. And as every bit of climbing Everest has an element of danger involved, I’ve so used a thin red line motif in various places and ways throughout the book.

it’s an app!

graphic design blog

I’m excited to say my first iPad app is up and running!

It’s been a process. Or several processes, actually. The Adobe process, the Lerner process, and the Apple Developer process. Guess which one took the longest…

Journey into the Deep (the book) was released in the Fall, and was a joy to work on then. That’s good, since I basically re-did it for app purposes. There are so many fantastical-awesome-alien-looking sea critters in here, I never got tired of the images. As a print piece, they looked nice. Put them on a backlit screen, they look even better.

Here’s my favorite little critter in the book. Check out the eyes:

Making an app from a print book was an interesting thing—elements that work in books don’t necessarily add anything to an app. For instance, page numbers! I detailed some more about the app process in a post over on the Lerner Books blog.

 

Shameless plug: You can buy your own copy of the app here.