Thursday, October 17, 2013

Review: Ant Colonies


Ant Colonies
Ant Colonies by Richard Spilsbury

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Powerkids (a subsidiary of Rosen), subcontracted with British book design team Calcium Creative for this series. Calcium contracts with a long list of the series publishers. This seems like an interesting way to do business. They can put their effort into finding good ideas and making the books, or on getting ideas from other companies' editors and pitching them a concept for the series.

The idea behind the six in this series is animals that travel and work in groups--an interesting science concept to follow (ants, chimps, dogs, dolphins and whales, and lion prides are the others in the series).

While specific graphic designers are credited, this book gets more of the template treatment than original design throughout the book. The designers created a style guide and templates and then manipulated this for each spread. Given the stock photos, there is pretty good variety in what I get to see of wolves in color, composition, and content (the photos on the page about marking territory were unfortunately non-specific ;-) ). Again, I'm surprised at how a focused topic can have such depth in the stock photo library to support a whole book.

The text is unremarkable, but does offer three different levels of complexity--captions (10-15 words), small vignettes (35-40 words), and body text (2 simple paragraphs). The vocabulary and sentences are complex enough to allow for some interest to come from the text, but still very bare bones description with little voice.



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