Scholastic New Zealand Award
for Best Children’s Book 2018
Finalist
Designer: Anna Egan-Reid, Little Love & FLOX AKA Hayley King (illustrator)
Title: Tu Meke Tūī!
Publisher: Little Love
Format: 240 x 240mm, 24pp plus cover. Paperback, section sewn. Cover printed on 350 C1S artboard plus matt lamination and spot UV.
Typography: Museo 700 18/26pt for the body text and Gist Rough for the title
This was a tricky one to design, particularly finding a font that complimented the illustrations without getting lost.
FLOX and Anna worked closely together. FLOX supplied open, layered, illustrator files, so Anna could move, delete or add elements where necessary. Each element on every page was hand painted by FLOX, on a huge scale – A1 or A0 size, then photographed, and brought into illustrator, layered, then manipulated by FLOX and Anna.
Judges’ Comments: Tu Meke! Ka pai! Filled with the beautiful colours of our natural flora and fauna — kākāriki, kikorangi, kōwhai — this children’s book is a thrilling new addition to the growing te reo readers library. With an elegant pairing of text and image this book will not only delight readers but educate. We only wished the book’s budget could have allowed for it to be slightly bigger in scale and to be hard-back so it could compete in production values as it did in visual content and design.
