Four steps, a script you approve before anything is drawn, and a deadline we keep.
Kosmo wears violet and carries a sun on his medallion. His antenna records what is happening now and transmits it to the Great Galactic Exploration Centre. He is the funny one: he gets distracted, eats twenty calamari sandwiches and falls asleep on a museum plinth while visitors admire him as contemporary art.
Mila wears orange and carries a moon. Her antenna projects a golden beam that opens a window onto the past, and she is the one who tells the history: what stood here two hundred years ago, who lived in this house, how this was built. Between them they cover the present and the past of any place, and that division of labour is what makes the format fit almost any commission.
Your collection, your building, a figure from your town, an anniversary. The subject is not the important part; what matters is what you want a child to remember when they close the book.
One double spread per idea, with the text already written for the age and Kosmo's gags spread through it. You read it, correct it and approve it. It is the cheapest step to change and the most expensive one to change later.
Flat colour, clean lines and rounded shapes, the style of the collection. We show you the first three double spreads before carrying on with the rest.
We send you the complete PDF and, if you want it, a printed copy on the final paper. Nothing goes on press until you sign it off in writing. Then it is printed on FSC-certified paper and delivered to your store or your shop.
Kosmo and Mila are ours and remain ours. Your institution gets an unlimited licence to publish, distribute and sell that particular book, with your logo on the cover. What is not included is using the characters outside the book: for posters, merchandise or a campaign that is agreed separately, and agreed happily.
Yes, and most do. It carries its own ISBN if you want one, and a barcode. Many centres recover the investment with the first print run, and from then on the book is income rather than an outreach cost.
Ten to fourteen weeks from the moment you approve the script, depending on the extent and the number of illustrations. The script sets the pace: if approving it takes you three weeks, that is three weeks more. If you have a date - an opening, a fair, Christmas - tell us at the start and we work backwards from it.
You can supply the content, which is the valuable part: the facts, the dates, the things that must not be got wrong. The writing for the age is ours, because a wall text rewritten with easy words is still a wall text, and that is exactly what we are trying to avoid.
Yes, and it is cheap: the illustrations do not change, only the text. For a museum with international visitors the usual route is printing two languages in the same run, or a bilingual edition if the volume does not justify two.
In one call we will tell you whether the format fits, what it would cost and how long it would take.