On a Hippopotamus Through a Map
Article by Katarzyna Kubisiowska published in
Tygodnik Powszechny, no. 31/2017
Translated by Monika Riegiel
New York Times acknowledged Maps by Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielińscy one of six most beautiful illustrated children’s books in 2013, the society of French librarians honored it with the prestigious Prix Sorcières. Until today, it has been translated into 30 languages and sold in 3 million copies. The Mizielińskis have worked on this atlas continuously from 2009, when having come back from New York, they drew the first two widespread of the book – the maps of Poland and United States.
The idea has amazed the Dwie Siostry publishing house. They have started to struggle with international publishers – they had to fight to keep the chosen format. They were under pressure to reduce it as there were some concerns that the booksellers would not order Maps because it would not fit a standard shelf. The first to give in was Great Britain – today an oversized picture book is a standard there. A format which seemed to be uncomfortable some time ago, turned out to be a blockbuster thanks to the innovativeness and consistency of the Mizielińskis.
Every single edition of Maps (51 large-format widespreads with 42 countries on 6 continents) addressed to the older children, every now and then, or rather every climate zone, evokes a thunderstorm. It thundered most when a Portuguese writer Luís Peixoto drew attention to the fact the in the Japanese edition of Maps, the symbols characteristic for Spain: flamenco dancers, Don Kichot and paella were placed where Portugal should be found. He hyped the case in the Internet and the Mizielińskis experienced an avalanche of hate – Portuguese nationalists sent e-mails wishing them sickness or even better – death.
Peixoto did not grasp the convention of Maps based on the idea that icons presenting a certain country do not have to fit its borders (on the map of Poland, Lajkonik, Frédéric Chopin and a brown bear were placed within the outline of Germany or Ukraine). The Portuguese turned out to be kind enough to accept the authors of the atlas’ explanation and a promise that a prepared Portuguese version would be enriched with a separate map of Vasco da Gama’s homeland, but not honorary enough to publically retreat from the harmful opinion.
The authors do not succumb to the pressure from the Turkish side to remove the islands the Aegean Sea islands, taking 4 square millimeters, from their map. Turkey acclaims them as Turkish but do not officially admit this fact because of international relationships. As a result, each map must be censored by an army and hence, the Turkish version of the book, prepared a year ago, has been stopped from printing.
In fear of political and geographical disputes, the current edition does not include a map that was marked as Israel/ Palestine in the first version. After discussions with publishers, they came to a conclusion that there is no sense in explaining the territorial conflict to children in a bucolic atlas. A similar situation occurred regarding the affiliation of Jerusalem. Next to the name of the city, a pile of heavy volumes was drawn with information that it is a saint place of three great religions.
The Mizielińskis keep to the rule that the borders are set by a country in which the book was issued. In other words, China in the Polish version has borders acclaimed by Poland. However, China in the Chinese version has borders acclaimed by China. In the newest Maps, Crimea is still a part of Ukraine. There is only an inscription telling that it is under Russian occupation.
The Maps has conquered the world. Probably the same will happen to Under Earth, under Water published in a similar convention.
Cage with peacocks and balloons
They have been creating children’s books for a decade, but have been collecting them since student days. Two and a half years ago they became parents of twins. When we meet in their apartment in Warsaw, I step carefully not to squash a tiny toy.
We sit on a terrace and what draws my attention during a conversation is how different their communicative styles are: she is reserved and soft-spoken, he – talkative and expressive. She is left-handed, he – right-handed, and this is what I would notice when I ask for a dedication for my daughter and son.
I ask about the past which worked for the presence. She had graduated from a high-school with a specialization in visual arts. As for him, since early elementary school he had attended classes of drawing in the Culture Center in Łazienkowska Street. Mister Adam adored by children did not ask them to paint still life but gave topics such as “tight”.
She could not stop reading ‘Anne of Green Gables’, he loved Tolkien. She was not attracted by computer games, he was one hour late for his high school finals because of one. Both of them were born in 1982 and both were accepted to the faculty of graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw at the second attempt. When they started to live together, they created a darkroom in one of the rooms and made experiments with camera obscura. hey have always liked Bohdan Butenko and Janusz Stanny. They do not appreciate Jan Marcin Szancer. He even says that Szancer’s drawing is an affront for an illustrator’s job, as it is literally copying the content of text. He lost his respect for Szancer when he discovered that the only thing he appreciated in Szancer’s work – drawings for Tuwim’s The Locomotive – are, to put it cautiously, a detailed copy of a work prepared by the Levitt-Him duet.
They treat their debut work D.O.M.E.K. (H.O.U.S.E.) published in 2008 as their proper graduation work. Ola and Daniel believe that those defended at their graduation in the Maciej Buszewicz’s and Grażka Lange’s book design studio (they both got an A) – her for the Fairy tales about the Sun from various parts of the world and his for Stanisław Lem’s Fables for Robots – did not yet present the guidelines that should rule text and image as a logical unity.
At the Academy of Fine Arts they met the masters. Professor Włodzimierz Szymański taught them how to think practically – he engrained a belief that making art demands planning and expenditures, and gave tips how to create and not stay unpublished. From Professor Maciej Buszewicz they heard that it is not enough to concentrate on inventing a form, but via form you should distribute senses. Leon Tarasewicz outreached academic standards during his classes: he used to put a cage with peacocks in the middle of a studio or to bring one hundred balloons filled with helium – these were real challenges for the students standing in front of the easels. He did not allow for marasmus, but he provoked, encouraged the students to break the limits. And he stuck to a rule: every week everyone presents what he or she managed to do within those seven days, and others sit on the audience and listen.
“Designing a book is all about conveying as much information as possible in the most attractive way, but also about adding precision, mathematical calculation, and this is what I like a lot,” says Daniel, when I ask him why he chose graphic design.
“When I build a column, at first I count characters and leading. Only then I can adjust the font etc. Before Miasteczko Mamoko (Welcome to Mamoko) - a story without a single phrase - was created, each of several characters was described separately in a special chart. Linocut or drypoint – techniques which I learned during at the academy, are noble and useful, but do not interest me as an art for art’s sake. I use them, though. Pora na potwora (Let’s Go Monsters) was made in linocut. The images were cut in lino, we played at the level invisible for a customer, readable only for us and the publisher. At the same time, we created a book that can be read and arranged in several different ways.”
Client teaches humility
Ola and Daniel started to work together already at the academy. In their third year, they set up an agency called the Hippopotamus Studio.
They explain the choice of hippopotamus in the name by the fact that it sounds good in Polish and English and also is unpretentious, funny, and immediately leaves a trace in memory.
The agency designs and creates webpages (at that time it was their only source of income), invitations, posters, catalogues, for instance for the French Chamber of Commerce, as well as for Ericsson. They gain experience, recognize the market, test printing houses. The most difficult thing turns out to be, however, contacting clients. According to Daniel, the studies at the Academy of Fine Arts superfluously pump up the artistic ego. This becomes the source of their frustration in the moment of confrontation with an investor who completely does not grasp what the presented idea is all about. One day, when speaking on the phone, Daniel communicated to a lady, that they were selling a project to her for one zloty and that it was the last commission they will ever take.
Before they concentrated on the books, they created five of them, but no publisher was interested (one of their dictionaries in the future would become a basis of an application for learning foreign languages, Ba ba dum, which became Daniel’s doctoral project). Today, they treat it more as a portfolio, that they demonstrate to prove they can prepare each title at every level, starting at the first draft and ending at the negotiations with the printing houses.
Exactly at that time – in 2007 – the idealistic vision about the art of design in fresh graduates of the artistic university meets the publishing market that flatters the undemanding taste of consumers.
“I thought that if we present a decent project to someone who published trashy books, he would appreciate it and immediately would be willing to start the process of production. But it does not work this way,” recalls Ola. “A publisher usually has a specified profile and is reluctant to go beyond a legit pattern. Some of them did not even find time to talk to us. Only the Dwie Siostry publishing house made us an offer to create a book about the most interesting contemporary residential buildings. We searched for the most interesting - we wanted to have the forms that would stimulate imagination, to be able to compare them to something and to present something different than what we can see around us every day.”
She adds: “Our knowledge gathered previously in the process of designing webpages and creating computer games influenced on how we drew D.O.M.E.K. We wanted to show another esthetically quality in nonfiction literature for children. Today, there are many titles like this, but a decade ago it was an innovation.”
In the land of fonts
In 2009, 2+3D - a quarterly which does not exist any more, and which was dedicated to functional graphics and industrial design, published an interview with the Mizielińskis lead by Barbara Kęsek–Bardel. In the same issue the Mizielińskis designed a front page - their artistic visiting card, that referred to the stylistics of early computer games. According to Daniel, it was an ideal time for the presentation in a trade press. The native success of D.O.M.E.K. – commercial (25 thousand copies sold until June 2017) and prestigious (putting it on the IBBY list and the Polish section of IBBY award for the Book of the Year in 2008) – strengthened their belief that they should concentrate on the original projects.
Today they are able to design every title. They specialize in those without words (series about the life of Mamoko town’s citizens) and those filled with words coupled with image (stories about design, cosmos, the Earth, inventions, jobs, digestive system, etc.). They worked out a baroque style: a line resembling a child’s clumsiness, planes full of intensive colors, numerous characters taking part in common and uncommon situations.
They have also weakness for the fonts – they know how much they can express by creating a typeface. It began with the Bubole game. Its users were supposed to write their name – and here a color font was needed. Ola and Daniel came up with an idea that it would be angular, irregular, pretending 3D format. At the beginning, they made quick drafts on which they worked further in a software dedicated to creating fonts. On the trial printouts they applied technical adjustments, marked elements to correct and edited again in a program. This process lasted for several months. This way, Bubol was born as their first independent font and the first font which brought them some money.
As far as Mr Black is concerned – it was designed specifically for Kto kogo zjada (Who eats whom). Mr Dog Dog is a set of characters, figures of animals and cartoon speech bubbles which can be put into a story. Mr Cyrk was honored by Linotype as one of the best debuts of 2014. For the Maps they designed two fonts: Cartographer and Mrs White, inspired by the handwriting of a first-grader. Thanks to that, in the international versions they do not write all the words by hand, although each time they have to write all the titles from scratch.
Ola explains that with a latin alphabet it takes about four days of work, but with more complicated languages such as Japanese, Chinese or Georgian, it takes the whole week. Additionally, they have to check the length of words in a foreign version and if it turns out that a certain word is shorter, a space around it becomes too big. In such a case, they fill it out by drawing a sufficient amount of waves to the sea.
What will become of you
“The Internet coverage is unbeatable and no book will reach 100 thousand people in 24 hours,” declares Daniel who teaches game design at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. “The market of apps for children is promising; tablets and smartphones most often are put in their hands. We are not able to check how many seconds a reader spends on each page of my book. In a computer game, it is possible – I know that during a day, 10 thousand players accessed it, which word was most difficult for them, which function was impossible for them to discover. I can react and correct errors on-line, even the same day.”
The Mizielińskis create webpages (some of them serve as a complement to books) awarded with an honored title of the Favorite Website Awards of The Day.
One of those is Pica-Pic, a sentimental journey to the past, namely digitalized versions of the LCD handheld games from the 80s.
Creating this webpage finds continuation on a different continent – an advertising agency from the Republic of South Africa created in their office a great device that is a completely new maxi-form of those games, for the employees to use in a free time.
On the webpage cozciebiewyrosnie.pl, children can search for the things lost in a wardrobe, use the light of a lighthouse to conduct the ships safely to the shore, receive sound signals from the cosmos.
At the end of the interview, I ask Ola and Daniel what will become of their sons, but they do not want to share this with me. However, they would eagerly tell that their children look through the books they created and have no idea that their parents are the authors. Ola and Daniel are happy to draw with them, mainly cats and the things which a two-year-old can call. They have banned presenting any books to the children by the family and strangers. They choose them on their own, in this area they are radicals and do not have any tolerance for a rubbish.
Daniel would also joke that bringing up twins is an extreme experience, comparable to the Flappy Birds game. The players were frustrated with its difficulty to the extent that they were throwing their tablets and smartphones on the wall, as they were unable to gain even the minimal number of points.