Profile Books
Illustrations for ‘Ideas In Profile’
About our partners
Profile Books is an independent publishing firm, specialising in non-fiction. From the very beginning (on April Fool’s Day 1996), the company has sought to publish stimulating and sometimes humorous non-fiction. Whether laying bare the quirks of the English language in ‘Eats, Shoots And Leaves’ by Lynne Truss, or Mary Beard’s dazzling history of Rome ‘SPQR’, Profile Books has consistently delivered popular, accessible, but rigorous non-fiction.
Their need
They say a picture paints a thousand words, but what if you have specific information that you want an image to convey? Profile Books wanted illustrations for ‘Ideas In Profile’, a series of books that would serve as world class introductions to subjects such as politics. These illustrations would need to convey specific, complex information in an engaging way.
How we collaborated
We illustrated three books in the series: ‘Politics’ by David Runciman; ‘Art In History’ by Martin Kemp; and ‘Shakespeare’ by Paul Edmondson. We decided on a way of working that would deliver both a completed animation and illustrations for each book in a single process.
Profile Books provided us with transcripts of the books, along with audio file extracts from each chapter. We then created a storyboard for each audio extract, which we illustrated and animated. The resulting complete animations can be seen on Youtube.
We finally took individual illustrations from the animations and used them to illustrate the books, which were produced in both print and as e-books.
Project scrapbook: Politics
Project scrapbook: Art in History
Project scrapbook: Shakespeare
