Cool Hunting

Multifaceted New York-based designer Laurie Rosenwald is one of my favorites—her illustrations and graphic design has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times and almost everywhere else. She teaches a great workshop on creativity called “How to Make Mistakes on Purpose” (try to take it if you can) and her first book New York Notebook has a fun local perspective. She both wrote and illustrated her first children's book, And to Name but Just a Few: Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, and it's like no other.

The mix of collages with found pictures, photos, scraps of paper, crayon and ink drawings and the rhyming text in bold type explore color. Lines like "Do you have a bright blue suit? Do you have a small blue fruit? Blues are just the song to sing, when you don't have anything!" make for a wild kids book that ignores convention. I read it to my four year-old niece, Eva, and she loved it and took it with her.

See more (and read her grownup stories) on her hilarious site. Buy And to Name from Amazon, Powell's or Chronicle Books.