MSO Design / HeySmartyPants
Hell Pizza Reading Challenge
Every year Hell Pizza hosts a reading challenge for primary students around the country in conjunction with the New Zealand Books Awards. We’ve been lucky enough to be a part of this in conjunction with MSO Design and HeySmartyPants for the past few years, to say its one of our favourite jobs of the year is an understatement!


The artwork produced is a series of posters and reading “loyalty cards”, something for the children to keep track of how many books they’ve read. This is distributed around the country, with posters appearing in schools and libraries from top to bottom, as well as advertising and other collateral.

The process
Hootenanny’s role in the job is to create the illustration, which then passes over to HeySmartyPants to use in the design collateral. Initially once a theme has been decided we create a rough sketch to get approval from all parties before moving on to the next stage.
Once approval has been given the real fun begins, the artwork is redrawn in more detail, with clean linework being created in Procreate on the ipad. The next stage is dependant on how the final artwork will be made, sometimes it needs to be done as a vector illustration, and so its brought over to Adobe Illustrator and traced, coloured and textured within that program, other times it can be inked and coloured all within Procreate.



