My Heart is Like a Zoo: How Many Hearts?

This is a trailer for the book My Heart is Like a Zoo by Michael Hall.

I love this trailer.  Picture book trailers are hard because it’s too easy to just read the book and too boring to just talk about it.  So how do you make it interesting, but still leave something to be discovered?  This trailer does a great job.  It presents a number of images from the book and cleverly animates their transitions so that they seem to almost morph into one another.  It not only allows us to see how beautiful the book is and how clever the pictures are, but it makes us want to see more and to figure out how to make more animals out of only heart shapes.

This is well worked to highlight the illustrations and their intricacy as well as to focus on the theme of the book itself.  It is paced to appeal to young children as well as adults, which is great, since the book is one that will likely be shared with young children.  I love seeing ads that actually play to the intended audience like this when most picture book ads play to adults.  Kids are consumers too, remember.  It may be adults paying for the book, but it’s often kids driving the purchases!

Oliver at the Window: Mystery and Trepidation

This is the cover of the recent picture book, Oliver at the Window.

I love this cover.  I think that it’s brilliantly designed.  The image is bright and simple, but it evokes a lot.  The little boy, Oliver, and the lion are watching out the window.  The way they are peeking out suggests to me that they are eager to watch out the window, but fearful or worried about what they might see (or what it might mean).  It definitely makes me want to read the book to find out what Oliver and the lion are watching out the window or waiting for.

Apparently this book is about a child who is starting preschool and each day he wonders which parent will pick him up, which house he will be staying in that night.  His parents are divorced and he’s clearly confused, scared and wondering about the whole situation.  His uncertainty is clearly portrayed on the cover of this book, but it’s still comforting somehow.  You know that whatever he’s worried about will be ok (if nothing else, he’s got that lion, right?).  This was a brilliantly designed cover!