The Adventures of You and I

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

If you really care about printed media and want to see it succeed, then you’d probably acknowledge it must change in some way. The husband and wife team of Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio seem to understand this better than most; they remain passionately devoted to paper goods but also embrace the possibilities of digital technology. (Full disclosure: they’re friends of mine.)

Their latest project, “The Adventures of You and I,” is a great example of this. It’s a beautifully illustrated and imaginatively written children’s book that you can customize for the special child in your life. That doesn’t just mean you can add the child’s name to the cover or even to the title, though both are possible. No, more than that, you can configure the central character of the book, changing his or her hair color, hair style, skin color and clothing color. The child’s name gets seamlessly integrated into the storyline too, making the whole thing uniquely personal.

The Adventures of You and I

This is a hint of what a healthy marriage of print and digital can be, not just in its configurability, but in the fact that “The Adventures of You and I” is a thoroughly indie affair, too. No big publishing house was involved in this production, both because no big publishing house was necessary and because no big publishing house could have done this so well. Find out more here.

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11 Comments

  1. They should correct the grammar in the book title. They expect intelligent, literate people to buy this? Never.

  2. Very cool, but honestly, I got these same books when I was a kid. And I’m 44. I can’t say what the cost comparison is via those dollars versus today’s dollars… Maybe what my parents spent was way more equivalently, but I had picture books with “me” in them– at least, it was a red-haired kid with glasses in the pictures and that seems pretty close. But I was from a lower middle class family in Texas, so I’m guessing they weren’t terribly expensive. So dollar for dollar, I’d expect a LOT more customization than is apparent from your link. Not that they aren’t nice. They are. But I don’t see anything revolutionary here given that I got the same thing as a kid. Maybe I missed something? Or may my folks spent way more on those books for me than I think they could actually afford?

  3. And it wasn’t just ME they could customize. When the story they picked for me had a dog in it, they could pick big/medium/small and pick the color. I had a border collie then, and they were able to pick “medium” and “spotted black/white” in some fashion (and also give it a name) so that the Reilly in my little book was pretty damned close to the Reilly in my real life. I must be missing something. How is this 38-years better than what I got when I was 6?

  4. It really isn’t cute to get it wrong: “the adventures of you and me” would fly just fine. Sad.

  5. Thanks for the review Khoi.

    Re: The title. I give you “The King and I”, “Whitnail and I”, and “Yoü and I” (I bet no one called out Lady Gaga on her poor umlauting).

  6. Right, Armin, when it is preceded by the preposition OF, the object of that preposition must be ME — not I. ME is OBJective; I is SUBjective. No argument. This is basic construction. Either you speak and write the language correctly, or you don’t.

    Details matter. I would not buy or subscribe to a great product if it were presented on a shitty web site. Same applies here.

  7. Rick: This is for kids! it doesn’t have to be grammatically correct. It needs to sound fun, which it does. If you want to buy one of these for yourself, then you might have some more troubles than behaving like a pretentious grade school english teacher.

  8. The difference between the right word and the almost right word is more than just a fine line! it’s like the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning!

  9. I love Armin and Bryony’s work, and follow Brand New religiously even without being a designer.

    That being said, it’s not being a stickler to expect basic English in a children’s book. We share books with our children to teach them how to read. Either this was an honest mistake or Armin/Bryoni really wanted theadventuresofyouandi.com and figured people wouldn’t care about the grammar.

Thank you! Your remarks have been sent to Khoi.