Obento

Japanese textbooks

Nikki M Group typeset Obento 5th edition Student Books and Teacher Toolkits for Cengage Learning Australia.

Our publishing services included:

• typesetting
• illustration
• graphic design
• project management
• creative artwork
• preparing press-ready PDF files.

Educational publishing awards

Australian Book Designers Association (ABDA) shortlisted for Best Designed Educational Primary / Secondary Book 2019.

Educational Publishing Awards Australia (EPAA) shortlisted at the 26th Educational Publishing Awards.

Typesetting Japanese

The Obento series is typeset in Japanese and English. Pages are highly visual, combining text, graphics, tables, illustrations and images.

Typesetting included:

• combining English and Japanese fonts
• styling characters, paragraphs and tables
• laying out Japanese characters (hiragana, katakana and kanji)
• adding rubi text above kanji characters
• following artwork briefs and author instructions
• managing colour, style and consistency
• taking in author corrections.

Creative artwork

Nikki M Group provided creative services including:

• managing artwork list and file naming
• collating illustrations ready for typesetting
• modifying vector and raster images
• extracting artwork from previous editions.

Illustration

The types of illustrations we created and modified included:

• manga illustrations
• information graphics
• maps
• diagrams.

Realia

The Obento series used realia to present visual information in an appealing way that contextualised real-life Japanese culture, objects and activities. Some of the different types of realia used for teaching included:

• food: menus, utensils, recipes
• information: calendars, timetables, scoreboards, maps, reviews, résumés, newspaper articles
• technology: emails, web browsers, text messages, smartphones, social media, equipment, GPS
• instructions: treasure hunt, posters, how to cards
• graphical devices: photo frames, polaroid frames, post-it notes, washi tape, sushi characters.