So I spent the past few months of 2015 and early 2016 working with a publishing company based in Singapore. The company was launching a series of “teach-yourself language” books focusing on various Asian languages.

Each chapter would progress into more complex dialogues and expressions as well as side info about the culture itself. I’ve included some sneak peeks from the two books I worked on: Instant Thai and Easy Mandarin.

Instant Thai

The dialogue might seem a little weird. That’s because they pretty much gave me a pamphlet of phrases with various “themed chapters” and I had to construct some dialogue together with the existing phrases. I tried to make it as coherent as I could but also entertaining for the the reader.

Easy Mandarin

For this project the company was more upfront with the information and provided me scripts for the characters. However as a result I encountered pages jammed with dialogue — in some instance taking up more space than the images themselves. Below are some of the better balanced pages.

Instant Thai and Easy Mandarin