Gold Graphics, Illustration and Visual Communication Design · 2021
Who's That Eating Pop Up Picture Book
- A' Design Award 2021 Gold Winner in Graphics, Illustration and Visual Communication Design
- Awarded April 15, 2021
- CLIENT: Keitaro Sugihara
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 49,636
- Verification code E6B53491E6 · Verify this award
About Who's That Eating Pop Up Picture Book
This interactive pop-up book follows seven animals enjoying their favorite snacks, each with a 3D pop up fold showcasing their distinct eating style. Each pop up was designed with a single page cut out, and a second backing page revealing the inside of each mouth and adding structural integrity. This simple design, combined with paper collage illustrations, brings life to each animal. The text includes eating sounds via Japanese onomatopoeia, encouraging the reader to open and close the pages as the animals munch away.
Keitaro Sugihara's Who's That Eating Pop Up Picture Book emerges from the distinguished tradition of interactive children's literature that transforms passive reading into active discovery, a lineage extending from Lothar Meggendorfer's nineteenth-century mechanical marvels through contemporary paper engineering innovations. The work demonstrates sophisticated understanding of how graphic design principles serve pedagogical and entertainment functions simultaneously, employing a bold chromatic strategy where the saturated yellow presentation surface creates immediate visual magnetism while the white cover provides necessary breathing space for the central illustration to command attention. The apple, rendered with textural sensitivity suggesting the organic variability of natural forms, functions both as recognizable fruit and as portal to wonder through its die-cut aperture, inviting young readers to physically engage with the question posed in the title. The inclusion of the curious mouse character introduces narrative possibility and emotional connection, its simplified yet expressive form exemplifying the economy of means that distinguishes accomplished picture book illustration. The designer's technical facility appears in the harmonious integration of typography, illustration, and paper engineering, each element supporting rather than competing with others. The work invites contemplation of how physical interaction with books creates deeper cognitive and emotional engagement than purely visual experience, and how questions rather than statements stimulate imaginative participation, asking viewers to consider what discoveries await within.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- This interactive pop-up book features seven different animals enjoying a snack, each with their own unique 3D pop up fold showcasing their eating style. Each pop up was designed with just a single page cut out. This simple design, combined with paper collage illustrations, brings life to each animal as they jump out from the page. The text includes eating sounds via Japanese onomatopoeia, encouraging the reader to open and close the pages as the animals munch away.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- 180 mm x 195 mm x 25 mm
- Tags
- Picturebook, Childrenbook, Popupbook, Bookdesign, graphicdesign,
- Production Technology
- Traditionally, pop up books are created by pasting folded paper onto a bound page. With a younger audience in mind, I closely considered book durability in my design process. I challenged myself to design each pop up using a single cut and folded page, laminated against a printed backing page that reveals the inside of each mouth. If the page happens to tear, this design makes it easy to repair.
Each illustration was hand collaged with various materials and papers to create my own textures and colors. - Design Challenge
- The biggest challenge in this project was to design seven distinct pop ups that accurately depict each animal’s unique eating motion.
- Project Duration
- The project started in December 2014 in Tokyo and finished in December 2019 in Tokyo. Published in May 2020.
- Operation Flow
- For each spread, the reader is greeted with a different snack and an animal's hand. Who's that eating? To reveal the animal pop up, the page is extended out from the center. The alternative was to flip to a new page, but I aimed to keep each prompt contained. This design ensures a smooth flow from question to answer.
- Research
- For research, I looked at several pop up books for inspiration. I was curious about their approaches to book production and storytelling. I found that there are many complex pop up books right now, and I wanted to counter that by making something simple and durable, yet effective and interesting.
Prototypes were tested by a dedicated quality control specialist, my young son Ito. - Inspiration
- After experimenting with paper to make a simple pop up, I found that the pop up moved as I opened and closed the folded paper. This motion reminded me of an animal eating, which inspired me to create a picture book.
Colors of Who's That Eating Pop Up Picture Book
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G0E23 ShopGrand Interview about Who's That Eating Pop Up Picture Book
Since the mechanics are simple and final product is durable, readers - especially children - can turn the pages rapidly and repeatedly to the rhythm of the onomatopoeia, peek inside the mouth, put their hands in the mouth and imitate eating, etc. which makes the book more appealing.
The collages are influenced by people like Eric Carle and Shinro Otake, and I place great importance on working with original art. Rather than to convey a message, I choose materials for my collage from a visual standpoint- to have some visual hook and produce some kind of fun for the reader apart from the main story.This could have been done digitally, but the use of actual paper and tearing the paper by hand produces the shadows of the paper and the jagged edges of the cuts. I tried to create the texture of the creature's original skin, for example, the hard and rough skin of a hippopotamus. One of my goals is to make readers think “I want to touch it”. If you make it too real, the colors of each creature would be all brown or gray, so I chose pop colors. For example, the color of the goat is yellow in my book, which is different from an actual goat. The colors and pop-up movements were balanced overall and in the front and back pages in order to create variation.
When considering the pop-up mechanism, instead of thinking of a structure to express the movement of a certain creature, I would just randomly cut or fold a piece of paper and then ask myself, “What kind of animal does this movement resemble?”. For example, if it resembled the movement of a pig's mouth, I would then make it look more like a pig by making the snout a little bigger, and so on. When I discovered the jaw-grinding eating motion of an herbivore, I was so excited! "It doesn’t have to be symmetrical! This is great!”. I made a substantial number of prototypes and went through trial and error.
I mentioned before that I tried to create variations in the color and movement of the creatures overall, but in addition to that, I am also conscious of the many variations in the onomatopoeia of the eating sounds: “munch munch”, “crunch crunch”, “gobble gobble”, and so on. This also led me to consider what animals should be included. Furthermore, by using repetitive onomatopoeia, I try to encourage the reader to play with the page as many times as possible using the eating sounds so that they stay on one page longer. This was an important point for me.
The moment I came up with the idea of this book occurred when I was playing with my son by shooting rubber bands with a toy gun made from disposable chopsticks. In order to keep him occupied, I had to improvise and quickly make various targets to shoot, so I made faces by folding and cutting paper. The great discovery I made then was how easy it was to make a face just by folding a sheet of paper, and just how many variations could be made. Therefore, when I first started work on this picture book, it was originally a “peek-a-boo” book with various faces. When I showed the prototypes to people, they told me, “It would be better you make it about eating something since its mouth is moving." I felt that that there are already so many “peek-a-boo” picture books on the market, so it was another important moment for me when I changed the idea to “Who's That Eating Pop Up Picture Book”.
The best thing is to be able to check whether or not a child is actually staying on the page and playing. I could see when my son was enjoying it, and I could also see what needs to be fixed and what is working well. Children’s reactions are honest, and if they are not interested, they just won’t even look at it. When I showed him a draft version in black and white, he would give me advice like, “You should add color!”
When I was about 20 years old, I saw a pop-up picture book of Alice in Wonderland by Robert Sabuda for the first time. I was shocked by how amazing it was; when I opened the book, it really jumped out, and when I closed it, it all fit back neatly into the book. I was so impressed that I have been buying pop-up books ever since. But it was impossible to imitate them; even when I took them apart to understand them, I couldn't put them back together because they were so complicated. But I always had a longing for pop-up picture books and a desire to make them. Moreover, I wanted to make something that no one else had made.Few Japanese authors make pop-up picture books, and in most cases, the story is conceived by the picture book author and the mechanism is then created by a paper engineer (pop-up artist). In order to differentiate myself from them, I aimed to become an author who could create both the story and the pop-up mechanism by myself. What I was able to create was a “picture book with a simple structure”.As a result, I'm proud to say that this picture book is well-balanced in every respect: it is in the form of a quiz about food and animals, it uses onomatopoeia, and the pages can be moved to the rhythm of it, making it not only fun but also an educational tool.Nowadays, I sometimes conduct workshops for customers, and some are surprised at the simplicity- that the pop-up is made from a single piece of paper. It wouldn’t be possible to have customers create a book in a workshop if it were a complicated structure, so I think it’s a nice bonus, although not my main aim.
If the book were made in the conventional page-turning format with complex pop-up mechanisms, the pages would have more weight to turn and need to be opened slowly. This would make it difficult to play with and move rhythmically and repeatedly with the onomatopoeia. So, considering the balance between the rhythm of the movements and the complexity of the structure, I thought this format was the best answer.
This book was the first book of mine that sold well, and its follow-up books have also since been published. However, the three or four books I had published before this book all went out of print. If this book did not sell, I thought I would quit my career as a children book author. I am proud to say that my previous books were also interesting, but from the time of creation, I felt that "Who's That Eating Pop Up Picture Book" was innovative and full of things I had never seen before. I thought that if this book did not receive recognition, the world simply does not like what I like, and if this book was not appreciated, it meant that I just did not have talent. Therefore, I was really focusing on this pop-up book as my last chance, because even though this was my first time making a pop-up book, I was ready to specialize and be called a pop-up picture book artist. Now that this book has been highly acclaimed, I have gained confidence that people can see and understand what I find interesting, and I am now ready to create new picture books without pop-ups.
In particular, the last page is a scene of a large creature opening its huge mouth, so I wanted to create a large, dynamic, three-dimensional pop-up expression, but at the same time, I had to plan for it to fit neatly into the book when it is closed. A pop-up made with multiple parts allows for a great deal of freedom in this area, but there were many restrictions and difficulties in expressing this in a simple single-page structure.