I was at Cheltenham literary festival over the weekend. On Sunday, after my own event, I went to Elif Shafak’s evening talk. During the talk she kept returning to how much she enjoys these events, with live audience questions and debates that are long enough to allow answers with nuance and depth. That they are the antithesis of the knee-jerk sound bites and click-bait headlines in our media. She went as far as call these types of festival events our “last democratic spaces”. It was such an inspiring event, Elif is one of the most thoughtful and eloquent speakers I have ever listened to. And on this issue in particular I could not agree more.

At 8am the following morning, before I left Cheltenham, I went, out of curiosity, to ‘Breakfast with The Times’. An early morning event to discuss the news with Sunday Times editor Ben Taylor, Chief Political Editor Tim Shipman, and Literary Editor Laura Hackett. Both Ben and Tim have had previously held editor positions at the Daily Mail. Their discussions about the days headlines kept coming back to name dropping dinners with politicians and thigh-slapping anecdotes about their visits to Jeremy Clarkson’s farm. By the way the audience was guffawing it was clear this was a very different crowd to the literary events I was at the night before. But it soon turned to serious discussion, because this was Sunday morning 7th Oct, the anniversary of the 7th October attacks and marking a year of Israel’s genocide. The talk that dominated, however, were discussions framed around ‘antisemitism’ and ‘hate marches’. Even the literary editor, Laura Hackett, added to this. She told us she was baffled when she heard that some of her Jewish friends were attending these marches. I dont have a recording of this part but I believe the exact sentence said was “Imagine the mental gymnastics that are needed for a jewish person to join an anti-jewish march”. Mental gymnastics indeed.  

But then at the Q&A at the end I got the chance to ask a question. I stood up and described my horror at watching baby’s bodies being pulled out of rubble again and again almost daily for a year. And my disgust every time I look at the news stands. Not just the Times and Sunday Times but all of the British press for their shameful coverage. Then I read out, as an example, the Times’ own mealy-mouthed embarrassment of a headline that marked the month anniversary of the attacks: ”Israeli’s marked a month since Hamas killed 1,400 people and kidnapped 240, starting a war in which 10,300 Palestinians are said to have died.” I was heckled by Tim by this point but i managed to ask Ben, the Sunday Times editor, how can you write a headline like this and sleep at night? Ben’s response was, in fairness, more generous than I was expecting. But he left, I think, two elephants standing in the room. He said “even the BBC who are impartial” “are getting a huge amount of push-back on this issue”. First of all I dont think anyone with their hand on their heart could ever argue that the BBC is impartial on this issue. But what is interesting in this response is his implied admission that he is not being impartial. It’s not news that the Times is a conservative newspaper, but shouldn’t his paper be at least attempting to present the truth with some degree of impartiality? Is The Times and Sunday Times are still considered newspapers of record? This, straight out of the mouth of its editor-in-chief I think answers this. He then went on to say that the headline needed to be worded in this way because “Israel closed the border to journalists and so they have no way of knowing and have to rely on reports”. Which begs another question which surely any good editor would ask themselves when faced with such an extraordinary situation. Do you think it’s fine that British tax payers are arming a state that is indiscriminately bombing a region where no journalist is even allowed to enter? Is this ok? What sort of democracy is this? I dont know Ben. Shouldn’t this have been your headline? Why didn’t you lead with that? 

Which brings me back to literary festivals. Because, rather worryingly in my opinion, The Times and The Sunday Times are the sponsors of the Cheltenham festival. Like Elif Shafak, I am very grateful to literary festivals and agree that these are essential democratic spaces. So perhaps we should consider carefully the transaction involved in a sponsorship deal. Sponsoring an event is more than getting your logo widely seen on pamphlets and banners. It has the potential to shape the events and frame the questions. I am very grateful that I was invited to the festival this year, to talk about a book about disinformation of all things, so I am certainly not complaining.  Cheltenham is a fantastic festival. As are the others I regularly go to. And they are so, so very needed. But the potential for conflict of interest is clear. Why else would a sponsor like The Times want to sponsor an event like this? Our public discussions are already being framed by the questions these newspapers choose to pose, culture wars, migrants, terrorism, hate marches. Does this mean they also want to be suggesting the speakers for our festivals? Or choosing the subjects to be debated at events? Where are the debates about inequality? unregulated tax havens? corporate power? the corrupt arms industry that is undermining our democracies? These topics are simply not discussed.
There has been controversy recently over festival sponsorship. Festivals have a tough time just surviving, and many will argue that they need sponsors. Media sponsors in particular are important to bring public to events. But like everything else, this always comes back to a transaction. This is something I discuss in my book but I really think we need to have these discussions more widely. Because this, I argue, is one of the key things causing the deterioration of our public discourse. With very worrying implications for our democracy. We need to take a step back and look at how our information is presented to us. If our public discussions only come to us through a filter of advertising, sponsorship, and large media companies, then we have a problem. 

I have been writing and illustrating picture books for the very young for the last 14 years. But actually i began working on this book 17 years ago. Long before I began work on my first picture book.

The idea came in 2006. UC Berkeley had announced that year they were putting all their undergraduate lectures online for free. They were the first university in the world to do this. I began to listen to some of them, psychology and philosophy and others but one course title stood out as I scrolled through: THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION. 

I contacted the lecturers, Paul Duguid and Geoff Nunberg. They very kindly gave me their reading lists and helped edit the material. Geoff sadly passed away in 2020 and the book is dedicated to him. I think we have managed to make a degree course, the history of media, accessible for 10 year olds. I didn’t cut out any of the key concepts. I think we made a 3rd level media course accessible by making it visual.

The other thing that struck me the most is that this history is connected so closely to the history of graphic design, visual communication and media studies: all the subjects that I had studied. The history of information and the history of visual communication are the same history. So it makes sense to tell the story visually, something I am well-positioned to do. Immediately I knew I wanted to make a book. A history of graphics told through graphics.

The history of information follows history of information technology: IT. Computers, internet and AI. But it is does this by taking a very wide view of information technologies. Drawing is an information technology. Writing is an information technology. All communication is. And in fact there is actually a very clear line of evolution from cave paintings all the way to AI. Drawing evolved into writing, to print and mass media, social media. All are information. And AI simply harvests this and repackages it.

The interesting thing is information technologies are all of course also disinformation technologies. So there is always this undercurrent across all of this. Around 1500 just after print was invented we saw stories about witches, today we see a rise in fake news. When you see how the media has been used and controlled throughout history, you can start to understand more clearly how it is controlled today.

‘Well Done, Mummy Penguin’ comes out on October the 6th, its my 7th book. 

As usual, I thought I would put up a few early sketches here and write a little about how the idea came about. Before I had the idea for this book I was working on a project about a big, bad wolf. The wolf was absolutely awful, a real pantomime baddie. Annoying all the animals in the forest. That part was funny.  But I was having trouble making the ending work. He needed to come to a sticky end but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Anyway… this went on for quite a few months. It was working but not working so it was a bit frustrating. As usual.

Then, one evening, I watched a David Attenborough documentary. I think it was an oldish one. It was over lockdown. And a scene came on with penguins battling to get back home in very rough conditions and I thought… wait a minute… this is a great story. Exactly as it is. I immediately took out my sketchbook and drew out a few images. 

I thought it would be good if a baby and parent were watching the other parent trying to desperately get back home. It was going to be a dad to begin with, I think that was how it was in the documentary, it went something like this:

I sent it to my editor Deirdre. She urged me to drop the big bad wolf idea and work on this instead. So I did. I was very happy about doing this new story, I had done an animation about climate change a few years ago set in Antarctica and I liked the setting and always intended to do more on that.

It was working ok. The only problem for me was the story was that it had to cut back and forth between the dad and the pair at home. We had to be careful because although we adults can follow a story like that without even thinking about it a very, very young child will not get it. We dont realise how unintuitive those sorts of edits are.  Young children need a very clear continuity to be able to follow the story. It’s probably not quite as simple as some of my other books but I think we managed to make it clear enough. 

I didn’t like the way it was presenting the dad as going out to sea while the mum stayed at home so I swapped the genders around. The gender swap was interesting though. When the joke was on a disastrous dad it all seemed funny, but when it’s a disastrous mum it’s somehow not very funny at all, its actually quite alarming. There has been a conversation about how dads get praised for doing the bare minimum while mums often do the work day in and day out without credit. This gender reversal really seemed to underline it. Credit where credit is due.

I started doing some character sketches in colour to figure out the penguins… 

After that I went as usual to papercut.

I played around with some textures for the splashes like I did with the wave scene in little crab. And because it was really fun to do.

There was going to be some snow in it too but it seemed to distracting in the end.

I really enjoyed doing the water. The reflections and the smoothness… to me that is the most beautiful thing about those  Antarctic landscapes. 

Here are some finished pages. In all of my books I hide a squirrel. See if you can spot her.

I wanted to do a poster that would come with the book. I made a poster for the climate change animation and it was popular with schools. (You can print your own here) I like thinking of these sorts of ideas but I rarely get to do them because they are a bit unusual or because of cost or distribution issues. Last year myself and Deirdre (my editor at Walker) were doing a lot of walking around outside, still in semi-lockdown mode. We always have a little look in the nice independent bookshops as we pass. Then one day we struck on an idea. We could do a poster that comes with the book but they are only given to independent bookstores. It’s a nice way to give independent bookshops something back.

Well Done, Mummy Penguin comes out in these european languages (and Japanese and others) on Oct 6th. Hope you like it!  If you enjoyed this post you might like the posts I have done about my other books here

I’ve been working and thinking on and off about this project for the last eight years, so I’m very excited to be able to finally share with you some of my work from this.

Since 2013, myself and another unnamed illustrator have been working on a scale model of the solar system. It began with a conversation one evening in Spain.  I was working on a book about scale at the time which zooms from a tiny mouse all the way out to the planets and the stars and a conversation was had  wondering if any scale model solar systems had been made. The models on google all looked quite uninspiring and it was decided to make one ourselves.

In 2017, I released ‘Little Earth’ a virtual reality app that explores earth and a the solar system. After I finished that I was keen to start work on the collaboration. I named the project ‘You Are Here’ and began figuring out the sizes. If the solar system is 8km long (the sun to Neptune’s average orbit) the earth is still only 22.8mm, the size of a marble. It seemed to me that the best home for this would be a pedestrianised city location with a very long, straight line of sight. I was thinking of London and New York but no locations really stood out. I thought of the Poolbeg lighthouse in Dublin, it’s a lighthouse at the end of a 1.5km pier that goes straight out to sea. The pier follows the south quay of the river Liffey inland and goes straight through the centre of the city. All a straight line. To start me off I visualised it here so that then we could pitch it to potential funders and festivals. I still think this is one of the best locations for it.

8km version (10.6km if including pluto)

Looking from the sun towards all the planets and towards Dublin city centre

The view from earth towards the sun

The view from earth towards the outer planets

Jupiter (at the start of Poolbeg pier)

Saturn (next to the Pigeon House chimneys)

Uranus (next to the O2)

Neptune (Dublin city centre/Millenium bridge)

Pluto (in the war memorial garden)

Detail of a 4mm Pluto!

related statistics

 I ended up making seven different versions of these PDFs in different locations and with different plinths…

The other advantage to this is that Dublin bay itself is semi-circular bowl. To the north, Howth head arcs around. To the west and south are the Dublin mountains and Killiney Hill . The very centre of the bay is Poolbeg lighthouse. From all these surrounding hills and mountains, which are popular walks for Dubliners, Poolbeg lighthouse and the south wall are clearly visible. And of course the lighthouse can be seen all across the bay at night. It’s easy to imagine the size of the solar system mapped onto the city. If the earth is the size of a small marble, the solar system would be bigger than the whole city of Dublin.

Photo thanks to Felix Morelli @iofelix

*note the rising sun is the same size as the sun model  when viewed from the earth

The pier is facing east so as the sun rises from the sea at dawn it would appear exactly the same size as the 2.5m globe when it is viewed from the model of the earth.

I really liked these statistics I calculated to go with a 23mm marble earth:

• The speed of light at this scale would be the same speed as a very slow walk, light takes 4hours 15mins to get from the sun to Neptune …which probably would be roughly the time you might walk the 8km distance with children. 
  
• At the same scale the next nearest star to us (Alpha Centauri) is 80,000 km away, around  twice the circumference of the world.
  
• Betelgeuse, which is the orangey star in Orion (his left shoulder) and is one of the brightest stars in the sky, would be more than a kilometre across. 
  

Only by experiencing these things physically in space can we really begin to understand these unimaginable scales.

Richard Seabrooke was brought on board to help produce it. Myself and Richard walked the Poolbeg pier on a freezing, windy day in March 2018.

We together spoke to the Science Gallery in Dublin and The Festival of Curiosity, CBI and others. One issue with the Poolbeg location was that the route crossed a number of different Dublin city council regions. As a compromise it was suggested that we should do it in the Phoenix Park instead. That way only one permission would be needed. I went back to the drawing board and mapped it to Chesterfield avenue, a perfectly straight 2km of road through the park.   I proposed to make it in conjunction with Newgrange in Ireland too because theres a nice Irish/Astronomy connection. I had a chat with Hay Festival and Edinburgh Festival. I even sent it to NASA. They said they couldn’t fund it but kindly offered help in other ways and put us in touch with the Goddard solar system division. I’m so grateful for all the people who have put their time and input into this.

It’s such a nice idea I think. It’s a way to get people out and walk and provides a beautiful, free day out in any city. It a relatively simple thing to make and I  think that it can really set children’s imaginations soaring. Every city could have one, I was living in Madrid at this time so of course I also thought to visualise it there. The bank of the Manzanares river has recently been landscaped and there is a running track and playgrounds and cycle lanes along the entire length of it, this park ends at the Matadero, an enormous cultural space. The sun and inner planets could all sit within the Matadero while the outer planets could run the length of the Manzanares. I visualised it here too and was pitching our project to everyone I could think of in Madrid too.

THE AR APP

As I mentioned, I’d been working on a VR project, Little Earth the previous year. VR is an incredible medium but its almost too immersive. You lose all bearings and sense of reality and so scale and distance is not something you could show with VR. I had spent the day plotting the solar system along the river and that evening I went for a walk in the same area… I looked down at google maps to get my bearings… and saw the very same map I had been looking at all day. I had an idea! Augmented reality could work really well with the project! It would add a completely different dimension to the project. Seeing the planets mapped to the map is what makes it tangible.

The signage and interactivity would need to be limited on the plinths and the planets at this scale are mostly small marbles so an augmented reality app could provide something interactive and exciting. There could be unique animations that encourage children to walk the full length and visit each planet. I emailed my collaborators the next morning and they really liked the idea. I then spoke to my app maker friend, Egmont at Red Rabbit. He suggested that animations within the app could be ‘unlocked’ at each planet. It would be nice to have informative, interactive animations and something novel to explore at each point in the walk. Perhaps these ‘unlocked’ animations could remain in the app afterwards as a reward. If all the planets were not visited on the day out, it would be a reason to return and unlock the other planets. I love this idea. I know if I was a young child I would have got really excited about something like this.

I imagined the app would maybe have two modes. 

Streetmap mode:

The first mode would be a street map of Dublin that operates a little like Google maps and shows you where on the route the next planet is. You could also play around with it, the distance from Earth to Neptune is 4.3 billion kms which doesn’t mean too much to anyone. However when viewed through this app it would tell you the driving time, walking time and speed of light times. It’s a thousand year drive, an eight thousand year walk or four hours at the speed of light.

Space mode:

The second mode would be the planet mode where you are travelling through space. The planet mode would say ‘Welcome to Jupiter/Earth/Mars’ and show facts about the planet and a sped up animation of it spinning to see how long its days are and its moons. The atmosphere, temperature and the probes that have orbited or landed there. It would be inside this mode that I would imagine you could unlock the planets by visiting them. 

For the design of the plinths, one of my main concerns was vandalism. I grew up in Dublin and I couldn’t imagine this thing surviving one night without being covered in graffiti or all the planets disappearing. Especially Uranus. We tried to design it with as little surface faces as possible. I roped in my landscape architect friend, Rowan D’arcy to help. It also seemed to me that the plinths should be as simple as possible in order to focus attention on the planets themselves. The problem is the planets are absolutely tiny, most are invisible from a hundred metres away. They need signage to be seen from a distance. A spotlight would also be good so that they are visible at night much like they are to us in the night sky.

I was quite happy with my solution here to have a single downward arrow for each planet that would also house a downward spotlight. It cannot be climbed and the whole construction has a no bigger footprint than a lamp post. That way they can function from a distance in day and night. And if we do each planet with a different colour we can identify them from even the greatest distance. In order to avoid the huge cost of digging up 8km of road we would put a solar panel all the way along the vertical post. That should provide enough power for the LED bulb and the trigger for the AR proximity sensor.

I asked another friend of mine,  Alex Kaiser at different to create these visualisations:

A version of this project is now launching.  It is being funded by the UK Government, as part of the Brexit Festival. I had no part in the submission. As you can imagine, as an EU citizen I’m not too happy about this. However it does give me the opportunity to share my own work here and so hopefully bring my own version of this to life. 

I’d love to bring my version of this to other cities. Especially Dublin. I think theres so much potential for projects like this one especially in conjunction with augmented reality. Myself and Rowan have found some exciting leads already. Please get in touch or share this if you know of a place or institution that could help create it. We’d love to make it happen. 

…………

To me, this idea is all about the power of illustration. As a young child I loved to read science fact books. I remember reading one that compared the size of planets and their distance. If the sun is the size of a beach ball, then Earth is the size of a pea a hundred yards away, Jupiter is a grapefruit a mile away and so on and Pluto is a speck of sand 3 miles away. I probably wouldn’t have known what that really meant but my Dad had explained it to me. That means if the sun is a large beachball at our front gate, then earth is a pea at the bend in our road, Jupiter is a grapefruit at the Ballinclea Y-junction, and Pluto is a speck of sand in Dun Laoghaire. I may not have really been able to understand what 3 miles is but I knew how far Dun Laoghaire was and how big a speck of sand is. My Dad brought it home to me.  I realise now how lucky I was to have things explained to me like that.

That thought made such an impression on me. I remember sitting in the back of the car on subsequent trips to Dun Laoghaire, picking out all the landmarks and imagining being in a spaceship flying past grapefruit Jupiter. And the vertigo of imagining a tiny speck of sand floating in space when I was in Dun Laoghaire with Mum doing the shopping. To me, thats the power of illustration. It’s a tool to visualise something abstract so that it becomes vivid in the mind.

I can’t wait to have these solar systems made. In the meantime I made this printable scale model.  It can be used in the same way and isn’t too different from the one that inspired me as a child. You can download it here. Print it out on A4 paper and it will be the correct scale for a 4km model. I thought it could be an interesting activity to do with children. You could map the planets to the surroundings they are familiar with. You could take a walk and draw the planets on the ground with chalk using the sheet as a size template. Or maybe you could bring it to a beach or park and find the right sized stones and place them along a 4km track. Send me pictures and please let me know if you have other ideas with this.