Awesome has a name: Zeke Meeks

I had the pleasure of working on our new Zeke Meeks series for the last year. This series is so ingenious and funny, it will bring you to tears. Yeah, funny even for a grown girl like me. (Please notice I did not called myself a grown-up, I'm not . . . yet anyways.)

I wanted to share the funky eureka process with everyone out there and unveil some of the little secrets of this project on the visual side.

Nine months ago I brought the first manuscript home and showed it to my daughters. We read it together and laughed hysterically. Now, my job was to output this great content correctly. Panic . . . terror . . . all of it started to set in. Part of our job as art directors or book designers is being the matchmaker between the story, visuals, and audience.

I looked for an illustrator for a month. No luck. One day I decided to post something ridiculous about my illustrator search on twitter: "Looking for an awesome illustrator for a chapter book that knows comedy & enjoys irony at its best.” (I thought it sounded smart at the time, really I did.) Many submissions came along, and I knew I had found the perfect match for Zeke in illustrator Josh Alves. Why? He understood cleverness and irony when it came to illustrating, and his style said Zeke all over it. I pitched Josh the project, he loved it, and was a shoo-in.

Now I had the awesome story and the great illustrator, but I still needed the design to glue the parts together. It was one of the most challenging and involved developments I've done. I produced more than 30 versions of the covers before Michael Dahl, back from one of his many trips, dropped a magazine on my desk with a post-it that read: "Cool inspiration for Zeke." It was a high fashion magazine. I stared at it, completely puzzled. Then I got an email from Michael explaining the magazine on my desk. It was a crazy idea, and it was perfect. I laughed, grabbed a piece of paper, sketched and doodled like a first grader, and that was that.

I simply asked myself, “What would Zeke say about his own covers?” I could hear a little voice inside my head. The coolest guy you'll ever meet. My hair looks awesome. Panic makes my eyes go big. (maybe too big, not my best feature.) No TV is scarier than a horror movie. I visualized the design entwined with the text, the branding, and Josh's illustrations. It was a total eureka moment.

This project was a full-throttle collaboration of the creative team, sales and marketing, and many other people. It was a super crazy process, but in the end it turned out exactly like Zeke Meeks—completely awesome!

One month after being released, these books seem to be flying off the shelves! Which it makes us all grin proud with excitement. If you get the chance to check them out at the your library or local bookstore, let us know what your thoughts are! We can't wait to hear from you!

Sometimes Design Nature Takes Over

During every book production season, there are moments you will always remember and treasure until the end of time. Certain "Je n'est-ce pas" that make you hold your breath, like the moment before sending a cover to print, or even the day before you start designing a book you love. The excitement builds up and makes you push the project to a higher level. You are guided by so much conviction and truth that it gives you chills to work on it. Yes, I know it sounds funny, but I know people out there understand what I'm talking about.

This season, I had these sort of experiences while designing Fairieground, a series co-written by Beth and me. I've never had to design anything I've written before. This was a first, and it was definitely a challenge. It took many drafts, many hours of research, and many trials and errors. Yet, Beth and I are very proud with the outcome. It was a joint effort. Odessa Sawyer, our super talented illustrator, influenced the design and the book narratives with her gorgeous realistic illustrations.

The books come out this spring, but here is a little sneak peak of what the fairies in the Willow Forest are hiding from all of us. Enjoy!

Fiction Friday: The kid becomes the adult, the adult becomes the child.

I heard a concept that was foreign to me last week while watching a training video. It said that opposed to what many people believe, our own traits as children stay with us forever. That each trait is something that we’ll never grow out of and is so engrained to our personality that it only gets stronger with age. The video explained that deep inside we feel the same way we did when we were kids and if anything, it makes you more passionate about what you do, about your “super powers” as I call them, or “strengths” as everybody else does.

That thought brought me back to my childhood. I was an introvert, but yet I loved to tell stories and draw them out. I wanted to be able to tell the story more accurately to help other people get it. When I grew bigger, I started talking to my friends about what I’d dreamed the night before. I would paint scenes and color with pencils for hours, softly so there wouldn’t be any lines on the paper. I didn’t wanted people to get distracted by the lines, but to take the scene fully in. Then at age 17 I started to write. I had a stack of white paper under my bed and I would turn my light on right after my parents went to bed. My pages were fully handwritten, and my friends would borrow them to read the next day so that we could decide where the story was going from there on.

That was me as a kid and now that I think of it, that’s exactly me now. This year I got an amazing opportunity. I’m an art director, so my responsibility is the look and feel of the books, but yet, one of the people I look up to when it comes to writing, asked me if I would co-write something with her. 

Beth and I came up with a super cool concept while having tea in our afternoon break. A hi-low series for girls. A story about two best friends, girls who are opposites. They fight over a boy, and one wishes the other away. We hammered out all of the details over cups of tea and coffee. And that is how Fairieground was born 9 months ago. 

Beth and I have been writing, editing, art directing and designing these books together. They have some of the best parts of both of us mixed and entwined together for kids to enjoy for years to come.

Here is the cover of one of the four books, all illustrated by Odessa Sawyer. Sincerely, I would say childhood and adulthood have gone full circle. What is your story?