Book designEnvironmental fantasy for young readers · Part one
Be careful,
or it will happen in the……
— the only line on the book’s first page
穿越未来之污染的怒吼The Roar of Pollution Through the Future
00The project
- Author
- Masha Ma
- Publisher
- Pacific Literature Association Press
- Year
- 2021
- Extent
- 82 interior pages · eleven chapters
The Roar of Pollution Through the Future is Masha Ma’s environmental fantasy for young readers: Sasha, Misha and Masha travel into the future, one kind of pollution to a chapter. The book has a second set of authors — readers aged five to sixteen, who read the stories and drew the future they saw. We designed the cover and the interior: stories that read easily, and room for the children’s pictures.
- Cover, spine & back
- 82-page interior
- Chinese & English front matter
- Placing the children’s drawings
- Launch banner
01The cover
A painting above,
a promise below.
The cover splits in two. The top half belongs to the painting — children holding hands in the smog — with the title set in a Song serif across the sky and the condensed English threading through the gaps in the Chinese. The bottom half is a block of vermilion: the title once more, then what the next book holds — “The Split Chicken”, “Love of the Little Gold Fish”…
- Vermilion#DE4D39
- Spine ink#21211E
- Paper#FFFFFF
02The interior
Chinese on one page,
English on the other.
The stories are written in Chinese; the book goes into bilingual homes. The introduction and contents face each other in two languages, the text is set in a Song serif with open leading, and each chapter’s name sits on an ornamented running head. Chapter one opens on more white than words.
03The drawings
The pictures
came from the readers.
The pictures inside came from a call for entries: young readers read the stories, drew what they imagined and sent them in. We set each drawing in the chapter it belongs to, on the page where the story reaches it, so words and picture meet.
04Children’s paintings
The last pages
belong to the children.
The book closes with a whole section, “Children’s Paintings”: dozens of drawings tiled together, each tagged with its young artist’s name and age. Here the names are taken off and only the pictures stay.
Care for the earth now,
and the future will not roar.