Animated gifs

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

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

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

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

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

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