Look it’s...

In 2019, I had been mulling new novelty series ideas and found myself wanting to develop something that felt visually nostalgic and harked back to the books of my 1970s childhood. This was pre-pandemic but, even then, I felt that the world was moving very fast, and I was yearning for something soft and hand-rendered, that would feel reassuring and familiar, but also dynamic and interesting at the same time.

We had had great success with the Felt Flaps Where’s Mr/s series, which uses bright, colourful felt in combination with Ingela P Arrhenius’ bold graphic artwork. The printer who we work with on these books gives us a lovely rainbow chart of 80 or so felt samples to choose from and for the Felt Flaps we find ourselves using probably the same 15 or so colours over and over again. This leaves plenty of lovely, but more muted colours - mints, ochres, peaches and fawns - which don’t work so well against brightly coloured artwork, but which have huge appeal nonetheless. So I set about looking for an illustrative style that would work with this palette.

My aim is to encourage little readers to engage with the book, either by touching it, or joining in with the words, or by being prompted to answer questions. For this series, I decided I wanted to invite the child to join in with the animals' noises, but then at the same time ask them to find a cute, tiny creature behind a felt flap - a double-whammy of interactivity. As an added bonus, I thought it would give the series a nice USP to have blocks of shiny foil - another way of attracting the reader’s attention, as well as being incredibly pretty!

I discovered Clare Youngs’ art on Instagram and was drawn to her textures and patterns, and the way she combines them to create images of animals which are friendly but also artistically interesting and edgy. This is a very, very rare skill, and I immediately thought that she had the qualities to work for this animal noise/lift the flap concept.

Clare had never worked on books for this age-group before but Zoe Gregory, Deputy Head of Design at Nosy Crow, the designer on the project, agreed that she would be perfect for it. Happily, Clare loved the idea too, and the three of us had the most enormous fun devising the first four titles in the series. We are delighted with the way the books turned out and hope that there will be many more titles in the series to follow.