The AlphaOops books written by Alethea Kontis were the two hardest books I ever illustrated. I loved the projects, but they were quite the puzzle to pull off. The basic concept is both books is that the letters argue about the order in which they should appear in an alphabet performance (the book). Z is tired of going last, A is quite happy the way things are, and every other letter has an opinion of their own.

The design challenge was multi-layered. First, there is this on-stage/behind the stage setting. In some scenes, letters are performing, as in Z is for Zebra, and there are scenes in which the letters are arguing about the “show” off stage.

The stories are mostly dialog. The original manuscript had a lot of “A said” and “Z said”. It was a little confusing to read. The publisher decided to go with a more word balloon like text layout which eliminates the need to identify the speaker in words since you can see who is talking. An easy fix for the editor, complications for me. Now every character had to appear in the correct order for a sensible right to left read. That course ment redoing the layouts of the first book. I had it figured out by the Halloween book.