Zaner-Bloser Superkids Reading Program Kindergarten Skills Books

Art Direction, Thumbnails, Book Layout

The Superkids Reading Program at Zaner-Bloser is a collection of products designed to help students learn to read in a fun, interactive way. The collection follows a group of kids called The Superkids, through kindergarten, first and second grade. During my time at Zaner-Bloser, I was the lead designer on the Skills Books for all three grades.

The kindergarten books, as shown here, were the introduction to the characters, and to reading. These included large illustrations, games, short stories and practice pages for students. I designed the layouts for all of the page types. I also created thumbnail art direction for the illustrations based on guidance from our writers. These thumbnails were then supplied to an external illustration team. Below you can see a sampling of early page designs with the thumbnails I created, versus the final page designs for a variety of page types.