One of the easiest mistakes to make when developing a colouring book is thinking the illustrations are the product. They're not. The experience is.
The strongest colouring books give colourists something to discover beyond the act of colouring itself — an unfolding story, surprising facts, a visual puzzle, a prompt to notice a hidden detail, a theme that carries them from spread to spread. The colouring becomes one part of the experience, not the whole reason for the book. That's what separates a book people complete from one they return to.
Publishers are always competing for attention. A beautifully illustrated page might get someone to pick a book up — it isn't always enough to hold them across sixty or eighty pages. Colourists need moments of surprise, progression and reward, and that's editorial thinking as much as it's illustration. It's what turns a collection of pages into a coherent publishing product.
This is where packaging matters.
The concept shouldn't be added after the illustrations are commissioned. It should shape them — a strong theme, an educational layer, a narrative thread changes the pacing of the book, the complexity the artwork needs to carry, and how each spread sits against the next. Developed together, the editorial idea and the visual language make a book feel purposeful. Developed apart, it tends to feel repetitive.
The same applies to series publishing.
Every decision then has to work at two levels — within the individual book, and across the wider range. Series identity, illustration style and the colouring experience need to feel connected, while still leaving room for each title to have its own personality. That's far easier when strategy, illustration and design are developed as one process, rather than handed from team to team.
For us, that's where the most successful colouring books begin — not with individual pages, but with a publishing idea. The illustrations matter enormously. They're just one part of building something colourists want to spend time with, and come back to.