The Green-and-Pink-Hair Books: An Editor’s Perspective

I have worked in publishing for the last 25 years, and have had the pleasure of working with Cara and the brilliant team of psychology authors for the last 10 years – neatly combining two of my passions: publishing and psychology.

I completed my Psychology degree back in the late 1990s, when the internet was only just taking off and the only way to read published articles was to trawl through shelves in the library. I stockpiled a huge number of weighty textbooks – all with text that just ran on and on and on and very few photos. Not terribly inspiring or engaging, but that was the way!

Out of the ordinary

So when I first saw the design and style of Cara and team’s psychology textbooks, I was blown away by how visually engaging they were, more akin to glossy magazines and nothing like the tomes that I was used to! They really ‘invited’ the reader to jump right in and I loved the conversational style too. It made me think "if only I’d had such engaging books when I was studying!". It has therefore been a real joy to work on these beautiful books and I can honestly say that I have loved every minute.

The spread-based design is key to our brand and means that we can neatly cover one topic per spread. A lot of thought goes into each and every page layout and the images that we choose to bring the content to life.

A fresh approach to imagery

Most unlike the textbooks available when I was a student, we like to illustrate the pages with different types of images to keep the content fresh and inspiring and we choose every image with great care. Yes, there are some more standard diagrammatic images, to show results of key studies or to illustrate some of the physiological concepts, but we also like to use more fun, ‘quirky’ images and captions that make you look twice and really think.

Some photos (especially in our Revision guides) are particularly ‘left field’ (and there is a zombie theme that runs through too) and these – we hope – make the student stop and think and therefore make the concept we’re describing more memorable. We also try hard to ensure the imagery is inclusive and representative of different groups so that we are not reinforcing stereotypes or excluding particular people.

Our ultimate ambition is to inspire students and to help them enjoy their studies (we love psychology and we want our readers to love it too!), and we hope that our books help each and every student to succeed and reach their full potential, with a little bit of fun along the way.

More information on all of the resources available for the revised AQA A-level Psychology specification can be found on our green-and-pink-hair series page, or by selecting individual products below.

Look out for future blogs on AQA A-level Psychology over the coming weeks.