Made By Humans #4 - Marijke Friesen, Meet Our Book Designer

Meet book designer Marijke Friesen. Marijke designs incredible looking books for publishers. When we decided to make a book for our fairy tale-themed mystery, The Enchanted Slumber, Marijke gamely agreed to help us with the project.

We didn’t know how to make a book. We had the story, so that was a good start. We knew we wanted the book to be hard-cover and we really wanted details like gold embossing, a ribbon bookmark and envelopes hidden inside so we could enclose messages sealed with wax. A wonderful artist by the name of Joy Broadbent painted the illustrations for us. And Marijke took all of these elements and brought them together to create a book that’s not just beautiful, it’s magical.

The handbook is small but mighty, packed full of spy history, how-to tips, clues and illustrations. Marijke put all of that information together and made it into something fun, cool, useful and awesome.

“I love working on Mail Order Mystery projects,” says Marijke. “The mysteries and the elements that go with them are so creative and unusual. I get to design stuff I would otherwise never get to do. I loved working on the book for the princess and the dragon because the illustrations are gorgeous and the story is lovely.”