Tandem Editions

I worked with my groupmates, Reid Bartholomew, Yovanka Lopez, Aashna Moorjani, Shobhadevi Singh, Avery Wayne, and Hallie Young to first determine the direction of our imprint. We all were interested in highlighting diversity from the get-go, and also interested in the editorial, financial, and design challenges that bilingual books would present, and so settled on an imprint of bilingual books. We decided to make it a children's imprint, as this would allow us to reach families who wanted to teach their children multiple languages. We also chose to focus on languages that are most commonly spoken in the United States, rather than languages that are most commonly taught in schools. For example, while most high schools here offer German, languages like Arabic and Tagalog are actually much more widely spoken. We want to meet families and children where they are—not force them to come to us.

After we had determined our direction, we began to research and put together presentation content for their respective areas of expertise. Another challenge here was the name. We wanted our imprint to feel childish and fun without feeling immature, and we wanted our name to reflect that. We also wanted our name to be easily translateable into other languages. After bouncing around a handful of ideas, we finally decided on Tandem Editions. It invokes the idea of a bicycle, which is often—but not always or exclusively—associated with children, and also the idea of two things working in harmony. In our case, two languages.

Once we had the name, I set about creating a logo. I wanted it to involve a bicycle without being too on-the-nose or too detailed to work at small sizes, since I knew it would need to fit on book spines. I settled on narrowing down to just the pedals, as it creates an interesting and unique form that's also simple and holds a strong connection to the name of our imprint. Plus, it lent itself well to animation for use cases such as a website. Choosing fonts and colors from there was fairly straightforward—I continued with the motif of childish but not immature.

In addition to branding, I was also responsible for creating mock covers and interiors for example books. For the board books, I adapted existing covers to be bilingual, then created a new cover that matched the series, with its own new vector illustration. Additionally, since we decided to pitch a line of bilingual picture books, I created a cover illustration, cover typography, interior illustrations, and an interior layout for our first example book.

Once we had all the pieces—visuals from me and content from the team—I assembled them all into a slideshow for our presentation to Macmillan executives.

This was such an incredible project to work on. Not only was it fun and challenging to come up with a new imprint, I got to meet and work with so many wonderful people for this project. The folks in the publishing industry are all so lovely, and I hope to continue to create with them for years to come.