Over the past 15 years I have worked with a homeschool curriculum company to produce many of the products they publish. In fact, there are at least forty-nine resources that could bear my name as designer. These are some of my favorites.
Exploring the World Through Cartography
Physical specs: 9″ x 12″, casebound, 4-color with full bleeds; end sheets; sewn binding
The owner wanted a book of maps from which students could learn world geography. Our principal audience was 12-year-old students, but we also wanted to capture the imagination of a secondary younger audience. Our team also quickly realized this could be a valuable resource all the way through high school. Thanks to the work of Library of Congress and other large libraries around the world, I knew there were some very beautiful historical maps available in the public domain, which gave us a great springboard to talk about the history of each region. The writing team indulged in anthropology with the question, “Were there physical features of this region that influenced the culture to develop as it has?” Maps naturally invited us to discuss climate, time zones, and map distortions, or projections. Since we had covered most of the sciences at this point, in the back end sheets we decided to include in a little light trigonometry. This was, hands down, my favorite project ever.
Marvelous to Behold
Physical specs: 8.5″ x 11″, perfectbound, 4-color with full bleeds; sewn binding
We developed this resource for high school students to study classic, famous works of art. The challenge was to provide reliable and accurate images of those works from public-domain sources. The book also provides tools for students to analyze any work of art by composition and palette, as well as providing brief insights into the artists’ lives.
Copper Lodge Library book series
Physical specs: 5.25″ x 8″, perfectbound, 4-color with full bleeds
This series combined public domain texts with various illustrations. Some images are from older versions of the texts and some, as in the case of Walden, are from beautiful illustrations created by Thoreau’s peer, John James Audubon. The series contains a variety of content—everything from fiction anthologies to biographical sketches—so the challenge was to create a cover design that unified them.
