I am a sucker for vintage airline stuff: posters, graphics, fashion, interiors, suitcases. It’s all so beautiful.

Flying used to be chic. A grand experience. My grandmother wore her best <GASP> fur coat when my grandparents flew from Amsterdam to Montreal together in the 1950′s. They sipped champagne, chatted with the other passengers in the on-board lounge with open bar and were disappointed when it was time to buckle up for descent. Airlines used to have tag lines like “Your Velvet Carpet to the World” (Lufthansa) and the stewardesses looked fabulous. Check this out!

I would so wear that. Check out the boots!

The graphics  were also übercool.

I’m quite partial to the Pan Am logo, which is a thing of beauty. Now close your eyes and imagine that thing on a bag…Poof! Done.

Oooooh. Nice, huh?

Now pour yourself a drink, sit back, relax and enjoy the flight!

This book was the first one I did in Adobe Illustrator, and it sparked a completely new style for me. It helps me create bold shapes, high contrast, stylized characters and vector graphics that can be scaled up and down without losing detail. I am also trying hard these days to forget everything I’ve learned in art school. Especially the bits about anatomy. This in an effort to make characters that are simplified and stylized.

So I guess along with the book, a new style was born.  As inspiration, I have been looking at the work of Saul Bass. He was an American graphic designer best known for his masterful film title sequences. He is an expert at paring shapes down to their essence.

Check this sequence out for It’s a Mad Mad Mad World:

His children’s book Henri’s walk to Paris has some beautiful imagery. Look! Look!

Here are other graphics he created that just make my head spin:

Makes me think illustrators spend the first half of their lives learning how to draw, and the second half unlearning it. Gotta go!

Check out his interview with Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air

and his book trailer for IMAGINE, which is lovely. Enjoy.

Kirkus agrees and gave it a shiny star

And get this! Chronicle also made a sweet book trailer for the book.

Check it out here!

Of course I knew translation was tough, but I didn’t REALLY know. Now I do. It’s not about translating the words. When I simply translated the words, even if it was grammatically correct, it just felt clunky, or just plain wrong in Dutch. I realized every language has a different rhythm and feeling. When you learn a language, it is as much about acquiring the words as it is about slowly being initiated into a new culture with its own humor, history, politics, hurts, codes, mores. So what I realized was that I had to feel or visualize what I had tried to say in English, and then decide how to best capture that feeling or image in Dutch. It is as much about transporting the story into another language, as it is about having it make sense in another culture.

I am very happy De Vier Windstreken (my Dutch publisher) acquired the book and trusted me with the translation. We still need to decide on the names for the two friends. Ollie en Ippe? Wammes en Willie? Bommel en Mik? We’ll see.

So what does this translation say about Korean culture?

http://www.thepicturebook.co/

This morning, I received an email from a Dutch woman who lives in Florence and shares my last name. A distant cousin perhaps? I hope so. I like the idea of distant family members living in Florence. Anyways, she told me about Clet Abraham, a French street artist who lives in Florence, and spends the nights prettying up the road signs in the streets of Florence by adding removable stickers. Her kids love them.

She also sent me a link about Clet. Whereas I believe road signs are beautiful, Clet thinks they are invasive and absurd. His stickers are meant to provide the public with a “respectful alternative”. You go, Clet! Whatever motivates you, I love the result. Check out the “dead end” sign by a church on Via del Purgatorio. I would fly to Florence just to see that sign

Here is a video of some of his work. If I put this video on replay, squint my eyes and click my heels three times, I can just imagine myself there. Almost.

When Max was about a year old, he started pointing at stop signs and do not enter signs. Not sure if it was his urge to break rules (quite possible) or strong sense of design, but I immediately had visions of the two of us bonding over pretty things. I set out to find him a book about traffic signs. Not the kind that teaches kids what the signs mean, but the kind that celebrates traffic signs in all their glory. I went to my local independent bookstore and scoured Amazon, but came up empty handed.

So what does a self-respecting children’s book maker do when she can’t find a book she wants? Precisely. She eats a pint of chocolate ice-cream and pouts like a diva who missed first dibs on a limited edition pair of Christian Louboutins.

But…despair not. Once I came down from my sugar high, I figured there was no other solution than to make that book myself.

And as turns out, my little dude and I aren’t they only ones who dig traffic signs! Fabulous Chronicle Books thinks they’re pretty cool too and offered to publish the book. Spring 2012. It may actually even be out before Max outgrows this phase

It will definitely be out before I outgrow this phase.

Of course that would’ve made a much cooler cover image. Instead, Hopper and Wilson are wrapped inside this.

The book will be published in May by Philomel/Penguin. It’s a about two friends who set sail to the end of the world. Creating that book was quite a journey for me, not unlike Hopper and Wilson’s journey. But I often find that the experience of making a book is close to the experience described in the book. Or perhaps it’s the other way around-I decide to create a book that’s close to what I am experiencing in life. Does life imitate art or does art imitate life? Is there a difference? Remind me to never write a book about being held captive by two men in a convertible wearing red lipstick and tube tops.

Thanks for the shout out Betsy!

It was one of those defining moments, where you know what’s in front of you will have some profound effect, but what that will be remains fuzzy. I thought the book was a piece of art and belonged in a museum; I had never seen anything like it before. The words were hilarious. The illustrations brilliant, but the two were put together in a way that took the story off the page, out of the book and IN YOUR FACE. In your face funny. It was weird, loud and zany and fit the story perfectly.

If that’s what kids books could do, then I wanted to make kids books. So I quit my job as Creative Director for Coca-Cola, said goodbye to the big fat paycheck that came with it and started drawing doodles and scribbling stories.

Once my doodles had improved somewhat, I found an agent willing to take a chance on my work. Chance would have it that the agent, Steve, also represents Jon and Lane, the creators of The Stinky Cheese Man. A week after we first met at an SCBWI conference in LA, Steve called me to tell me he had sent my book ideas to <GASP> Lane Smith and Molly Leach. “Wait, Can you repeat that?” I asked Steve once I had picked myself up from my shaggy rug. “You sent my work to whom????”

That was the beginning of a great collaboration between Molly Leach and me. She has designed BLOOM!, PEEP!, SPLASH! and TUMBLE! and I love how she was able to capture emotion, energy and movement with her layout and typography.

So now the effect the Stinky Cheese Man has had on my life isn’t so fuzzy anymore. Was it worth giving up that big fat paycheck, you ask? ABSOLUTELY.

(click here for a Horn Book article by Jon and Molly about book design)