David Gibson

What he writes about

The books share a preoccupation: each one hands a child a single idea small enough to carry out of the book and into an actual afternoon. How a thought can change a mood. Why it helps to stand in someone else's shoes. What fruit is actually doing for a growing body. Why a rainbow needs every color in it. None of them is a lesson with a story wrapped around it, which is the usual failure mode of books written with a point to make — the story comes first, and the idea is what is left behind once it finishes.

They are also written to be read aloud, by someone who has had a long day. The rhythm is built for a voice rather than a page, the sentences are short enough to get through when you are tired, and none of them outstays its welcome. A picture book that is a chore to read at 7:40pm does not get read a second time, whatever is in it.

Working with illustrators

Each book is illustrated by a different artist, and the difference shows — deliberately. Daniel Noriega's work on Switching Shoes is bright, busy and funny, with things happening in the margins that reward a second read. Michael Warren's illustrations for Happiness is Just a Thought Away go the other way: warm, still, and unusually natural-looking for a picture book.

There is a reason for that last one. The artwork in Happiness was developed from real photographs of the author's own children, taken when they were young. That is why the family in the pictures has the particular unposed quality it does — faces caught in the middle of something rather than arranged for the page. It began as a family album and became a book.

Books that turned into games

Unforgettable Media publishes the books and also builds browser games, and the two sides have started to meet. Time Runner is set in the five locations from Switching Shoes — the playground, the house, the fair, the school and the city — in the book's own order. A child who has read the book recognizes where they are standing.