Co z ciebie wyrośnie?
English title: What Will Become of You?
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Dwie Siostry
Warsaw 2010
Dimensions: 20 × 25 cm
Paperback: 128 p.
ISBN: 978-83-60850-45-9
After creating a book about architects and industrial designers we thought that maybe we’re putting too much pressure on kids. You don’t need to be a space scientist to have an interesting and fulfilling career. This is why we created “Co z ciebie wyrośnie?” – a catalogue of sixty-two original, remarkable, and fun jobs and occupations.
Typography was the most challenging part of this project. Each occupation has a big, hand written title, illustration, and a short text. As you can see on the examples above, lettering plays a dominant role the image. At the beginning we tried to draw every element (including letters) by hand, but we soon realized it would be better to have at least one precise element to contrast our clumsy drawings. We decided to use Bello Pro by Underware. This beautiful script was great as it is, but we wanted to pimp it up a little bit. To emphasize the wave effect we started adjusting sizes of individual letters. Also we had to just a couple of ligatures typical for polish language and modify letters “r” to make it more recognizable for Polish kids.
All of the images were drawn on a much smaller paper than the final spread in the book. This gave us rough, thick lines.
The sales reports for this book were not encouraging. To be honest, after first week only 200 copies were sold and despite the very expensive promotions in most popular bookstore chain in Poland. We thought that would be our last book, because Dwie Siostry weren’t very happy about it. Fortunately, news from Bologna saved the day. “Co z ciebie wyrośnie?” received an honourable mention in Bolognaragazzi Award – the most prestigious award for books for children.
The jury said:
Throughout its long history, children's literature has always strived for a lasting alliance with Art. Examples are rare, but this book is one of them. Here a completely pictorial work becomes a story. The narrative flows in signs, highlighting allusions, line-work and the mix of colors. It gives more than a nod to the Mexican murales. The typography creates a rich narrative pace; the images have the evocative force of a written text. This is a rare achievement sustained by the illustrators' passion for artistic excellence.
We have no idea about what murales they are talking about but, hey, it sounds great.
After that experience we all agreed that some books don’t have to be profitable and never spoke about the poor sales again. Over 7 years later the whole print run of 5000 copies was sold, so no money was lost.
Foreign editions
Spanish, ¿Qué Será de Ti?, Libros del Zorro Rojo, 2011, ISBN: 978-84-92412-98-3
This book is very hard to prepare for foreign editions. It requires us to adjust the typography for every single text and hand-draw of all of the titles. This technical problem plus not that high commercial value contributed to only one foreign edition.
You can find a Google Sheet with a list of all our foreign editions here.
Become a closet organizer
As we already stated in “Tu jesteśmy”, back in 2006–2012 we were very fond of Adobe Flash mini games, promotional sites and interactive music videos. We stopped taking commissions for websites but we still loved (and love to this day) to program them once a while so we decided to create a mini game for “Co z ciebie wyrośnie?”.
The idea was simple: let’s make a website where you can play a few mini games themed around different professions.
The website is still live under the original URL (cozciebiewyrosnie.pl) but it requires Adobe Flash Player. It’s not easy to run Flash this days, so you can watch a screen recording instead: