Design System + 3 Sample Songs for a Children's Songbook (Adobe Illustrator, Print-Ready)

## The project We are a German musical instrument brand (Sonodrum). We are publishing a licensed songbook of ten **Rolf Zuckowski** songs — the best-known German children's songwriter — arranged for our steel tongue drums. Around 48 pages, A4, perfect bound, printed in Germany. The creative work is done. The cover is built, the illustrations are produced, the sheet music is prepared as clean SVG, the German texts are written. **We are not asking you to lay out the whole book.** We are asking you to build the design system and three finished songs — then we place the remaining seven ourselves. Everything below serves that one goal: a file we can keep working in. ## What you deliver **1. Cover — critique and finishing** Look at our cover with a professional eye and tell us what you would improve. Then finish it for production: spine width from the printer's template, back cover and spine to match. **2. Master artboards** Four page types: song opener, sheet music page, continuation page, text page. We must be able to duplicate a master, relink a new SVG and get a correct page — without you. This is the single most important quality criterion of the job. **3. Three fully built songs** Complete, print-ready, as the reference for the remaining seven. We will pick a short one, a long one and one with a different instrument badge, so the reference covers every case. The book has 10 songs on 22 sheet music pages plus one opener page each. We place the remaining seven ourselves, using your masters. **4. Front and back matter** Foreword, artist page, brand page, how-to-play spread, contents, imprint, index. Mostly one shared text template, filled with our copy. **5. Placing the sheet music** The sheet music arrives as clean, layered SVG, already styled to our specification — child-friendly numbers, correct fonts, correct colours. **Please place it as delivered. Do not restyle, redraw or re-engrave it.** **6. Files** Packaged .ai with all links and fonts, print-ready PDF, front cover as RGB JPG (2500 px long edge), and a one-page handover note. ## The one rule that cannot be broken The sheet music is licensed and every pitch has been verified by ear against the original recordings. **You may not move a single note.** No note head shifts horizontally or vertically relative to its stave. Nothing added, removed or renumbered. Nothing scaled non-uniformly — scaling a stave changes line weights and breaks the engraving. **We verify this** by overlaying your page on the original SVG at 50 % opacity. Note heads must sit exactly on top of each other. Same for the German text: please do not "correct" our spelling. Autocorrect is the enemy here. ## What we provide Cover as a layered .ai · 22 sheet music pages as SVG, print-ready · approx. 90 cut-out illustrations in a consistent coloured-pencil style · all German copy, final · logo as vector · brand colours in HEX and CMYK · product photography at 300 dpi · the WIRmachenDRUCK print template with the calculated spine width. ## Print and typography specs - Printer: WIRmachenDRUCK, Germany. Trim size and spine width from the template we supply. - 3 mm bleed, 6 mm safety margin, wider inner margin (perfect bound) - CMYK throughout, max. 300 % total ink, images 300 dpi, small text 100 % K only - Export PDF/X-4:2010 with embedded fonts — but **all text stays live in the .ai file** - Colours as **global swatches** with meaningful names; paragraph and character styles set up - Commercially licensable fonts. We are considering **Baloo 2** and **Nunito** (Google Fonts); propose alternatives with their licence if you prefer. - **Full German glyph coverage is mandatory** (ä ö ü Ä Ö Ü ß) and German quotation marks („ ") **Placeholders to build in:** QR code frame on each song opener, min. 15 × 15 mm plus quiet zone · ISBN barcode on the back cover, exactly 37,29 × 25,93 mm (EAN-13 at 100 %) · a **model badge** on every sheet music page and in the contents, reading "Für 11 Zungen" or "Für 15 Zungen". The badge is functional, not decorative — a reader must see at a glance whether a page fits their instrument. ## Budget and timeline **Fixed price: €400** for the scope above. If you think that does not fit, say so in your proposal and tell us what you would leave out — we would rather buy a smaller excellent piece of work than a rushed one. - Cover critique: within 3 days of hire - Complete delivery: **by 30 September 2026** - Two rounds of revisions included We publish more books in this series. A designer who works cleanly here will get repeat work. ## How to apply 1. Two or three examples of print-ready books or booklets you laid out in Illustrator. A screenshot of the layer panel tells us more than a pretty cover. 2. Have you produced print data for a German or EU printer before? Which one? 3. **Two or three sentences on how you would place supplied SVG sheet music into a page layout without distorting it.** This is the heart of the job; a thoughtful answer here matters more than years of experience. 4. Confirmation that the scope fits €400 — or what you would deliver for it instead. Proposals that only say "I can do this, please message me" will not be read. ## Confidentiality This book contains licensed material by a well-known artist. The files are for this project only: no portfolio use, no republishing, no sharing. We will send a short NDA before handing over the assets.