Obento

Obento 5th edition Japanese language series for Cengage Learning.

In Obento Deluxe Student Book, どんなあじ？‘What flavour?’ sections introduce Japanese language patterns. Students listen to audio and say expressions while looking at the manga illustrations.

Manga illustrations introduce vocabulary and language patterns. The main characters in the manga are introduced in the preliminary pages and are used throughout the student books. In this image you can see ruby text, small hiragana characters, above kanji (logographic characters) in the speech bubble on the right.

In the Obento Deluxe Student Book, every chapter starts with a manga illustration, which introduces key language. In this image, mobile phones were updated to smartphones and new dialogue was overlaid in the speech bubbles.

Manga illustration overlaid with speech bubbles introducing key language and expressions.

The student book contains many examples of realia (objects from real life used in classroom instruction). Here is an example of creative artwork, which represents the idea of social media posts for destinations on a map of Japan.

A vocabulary section showing how language is constructed and translated. Words are arranged and highlighted in different colours to identify verbs, nouns and adjectives.

There is a teacher toolkit for each student book. This book is a full colour wraparound version of the student book with margin notes and course materials.

Complex typesetting and creative artworking was required to interpret the author’s manuscript (in English and Japanese) and to develop highly-visual pages with many design elements.

For Obento 5th edition Japanese language books, Nikki M Group provided publishing services for two student books and two teacher toolkits. We developed over 1300 pages in total!

The Appendix typeset in a double column layout. The text is detailed with Japanese and English translations.

Here you can see intricate arrangements of text, images and layout. Speech bubbles sit over illustrations with Japanese vocabulary highlighted in colour.

Hiragana characters are typeset in tables designed to identify language patterns and expressions.

An example of a complex photo collage that gives students a taste of Japanese culture.

Mock Japanese newspaper articles. Text runs from top right to bottom left – the opposite to English. The articles were created in the Japanese version of InDesign and include ruby text for kanji characters.

Vector and raster design elements are combined to create a rich display of visual information. Colours, shapes, space, typography and hierarchy all work together to convey meaning and guide student learning.

For Obento 5th edition, manga artwork was updated to reflect changes in technology (e.g. smartphones) and changes in the narrative. In the image shown here, the last frame was updated to include the teacher and the girl holding the snake.

Hiragana and katakana character tables arranged in phonetic order.

Layout design of highly-visual pages with many design elements in English and Japanese. This image shows an example of a Japanese student calendar on the left and on the right, diagrams show how to draw and remember kanji characters.

Cartoon created by Nikki M Group based on an artwork brief from the author.