Welcome to Sara Gillingham Studio!

Sara is an award-winning art director, designer and the author/illustrator of books such as: How to Grow a Friend, Snuggle the Baby, The Empowerment Series and the bestselling In My Series. 

Sara and her team also provide design strategy, art direction, design and illustration to a wide variety of clients in the children's design and publishing world. Sara has almost two decades of experience in children's publishing, both in-house: as former Design Director for children's publishing at Chronicle Books, and as principal of her own studio. She has art directed/designed hundreds of children's books, and won numerous awards from organizations such as 3x3, Print Magazine, 50 Books/50 Covers and The Society of Illustrators. 

Sara has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, and a Masters in Illustration/Design from the Glasgow School of Art and has taught children's book illustration at California College of the Arts and UC Berkeley Extension in San Francisco.

Selected Design Clients:

• Amazon Publishing

• Chronicle Books

• Disney Hyperion

• Girl Scouts

• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 

• Klutz

• Milan Presse, France

• Random House

• Scholastic

• Unicef 

• World Health Organization

Selected Publishers:

• Abrams Appleseed

• Antheneum Books
  for Young Readers

• Cameron Kids

• Chronicle Books

• Phaidon

• Random House Books
  for Young Readers