Bajki japońskie

English title: Japanese Tales
Dimensions: 15 × 17 cm
Hardcover 88 p.
2007

This book was never published. We wrote and designed it as a part of our showcase in attempt to get a book design commission. Also, we just had such strong urge to create books and games that we would design them no matter if we were paid or not (we didn’t get paid for any our web games, but we invested months of work in them, anyway).

When it comes to most of our unpublished books from this early period, we nearly always treated texts just as an excuse to design a new book. Back then we didn’t plan to write our books and we were convinced that we were going to work on the visuals for other people’s texts.

Using folk tales from around the world was an easy idea, because Alexandra had already designed a book featuring ten fables about the Sun originating from different cultures as her graduation project. During the research process, she collected mountains of amazing stories.

We selected two of them and, after comparing their different versions, came up with our own one, enhanced with a little bit of humour.

The first tale told a story of the youngest and the only kind and modest child from a family of 81 brothers (it also contained a mini story about a rabbit and a crocodile). The second one (third, if you count the rabbit story) was about two frogs who travelled to see a neighbouring town.

This was our first finished project to which we created custom letters. Unfortunately, we didn’t make a font out of them, but that was a beginning of new trend for us.

The illustrations were drawn with a fine marker. Only the contours were drawn, as after the images were scanned, we filled the strokes with a solid colour and removed the contours. By doing that we achieved an impression similar to woodcut, without actually using any chisels ( we actually used ones few years later, for “Monster Time” and “Let’s Go Monsters”).