Designing Wonky Donkey
Written by our longest serving Wonky Wrangler, Kim Dovey
Wonky and I have a few things in common these days. Just as he was going viral, I was having retina surgery, which left me very one-eyed. Not a good look when you’re trolling back through the archives looking for some of the early Wonky designs and conversations back in 2009.
It’s been a super fun trip down memory lane, starting with this email from Scholastic’s Senior Editor, Penny. This all kicked off after their trip to Christchurch, which I have described in my Linkedin article here.
Penny also included this rough illustration with her email, done by the illustrator, Katz Cowley.
I don’t remember this meeting, but it must have been a goodie, because look where we are now! I know Craig Smith joined me on the marketing committee I was chairing for Te Tai Tamariki Trust at the time, so we must have hit it off.
This is the Te Tai Tamariki logo we designed from that time. I still love its simplicity, even today. The organisation is now called Painted Stories and comes under the New Zealand Storylines banner, so you can still look them up.
Getting started
After that meeting, we got to work! It all kicked off with a font choice from Penny.
A screenshot of the “Drawzing” font recommended by Penny.
Fun fact: a character map is the list of characters (letters, punctuation, symbols, and so on) designed for a font. Complete character map = happy designers.
Apart from deciding on a font, the rough illustrations also gave another idea:
Katz’s handwritten “Hee Haw!” from the rough illustrations.
The artwork
The illustrations had so much detail and they really jumped off the page. Our initial meeting with Katz helped her work out where the centre of the spreads would be (e.g. you don’t want any juicy stuff falling into the gutter at the centre of the book), and how much space was needed so we could fit the words in.
The art paper Katz used had a great texture to it, but it couldn’t be picked up by even the best scanner operator. So we decided to reproduce the texture, to keep that ‘down on the farm’ feel which matched the gorgeous donkey. We had so much fun finding the right textured background and clear-cutting out Wonky’s poses and friends to make the blend as seamless as possible.
Here’s how the scanned artwork looked like after placing on top of the new textured background.
After putting it all together in a first draft (we designers call this the “first proof”), Penny had some really important feedback:
The cover design
Now we are up to the fun part of a book design. Well, it’s fun when we can nail it without too much pain. We all know how important a book cover design is, but who would have ever guessed how important this one would be!
Here’s how the process began, with our drafts for the cover design.
And then some feedback from Scholastic:
Proof 2 of the cover, now with flaps and a CD.
Now things really started to hot up with a long phone call with Australia and a bit of a twist, which set the cat amongst the pigeons. (In other words, they asked us to try a blue cover instead.)
The first cream cover and the new blue cover.
And so we did…
That blue cover wasn’t everyone’s favourite choice at the time, but that’s just the process of design. I did come across one email comment that I’ll leave anonymous. 🙂
Scholastic now had the tough choice of choosing between two great cover designs, but eventually we had a winner:
And off to print we went!
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Finding this email sequence has made it worthwhile maintaining that back-up system for all these years. And there have been many, many books between then and now with the Scholastic team and Craig Smith’s self-published books, but this journey with Wonky has really been one in a million.
