As a graphic designer, I like to think of the book as a total unit, with the typography, the text and the art flowing together hand in hand. And this was something that I couldn’t do if the writing was already done. I couldn’t say to someone — especially someone that I didn’t know personally — “Can you change that word to something else because I’d rather illustrate this than that?”
So, I started experimenting with making my books. And if you’ve seen my books, you know that the pictures talk, too. I would start with the idea of what is it that I want to tell somebody and then make even the shape and the size of the book part of this whole project. For instance, if you look at Fish Eyes you will see it’s a long, narrow book — fish-size. And then what I’ve done is to cut holes for the eyes of the fish — because it’s a counting book — so that a person could learn to count either by looking at the fish and counting them, or at the number for number “1” or the word for “one,” or simply they could put their finger in the eye of the fish and learn to count that way. These are more concept books. These are things that all these elements have to work in tandem. And so once I began doing that, there was no looking back.
