The Alpha Oops books written by Alethea Kontis were a lot of fun, but very difficult to pull off. The basic concept in both books is that the letters argue about the order in which they should appear in an alphabet performance. Z is of course tired of going last. A is quite happy the way things are. The design challenge was multi-layered. First, there is this on-stage/off-stage setting. In some cases the letters are performing, as in Z is for Zebra. There are also the cases where you see behind the scenes and the letters are arguing about the "show".
We were messing around with the natural order of the alphabet, so we thought there should be something to help anchor the young reader. I created this little professor character who lives at the bottom of each spread. He brings out the letters as they are now appearing and places them in a frieze. You can see the original, now ignored, order. For the Halloween book, I had the professor bring out jack-o-lanterns with the letters carved into them.
The books are mostly dialog so the original manuscript had a lot of "A said" & "Z said". It was a little confusing. So the publisher decided to go with a more word balloon-like layout where the text is by each character that is speaking and therefore eliminates the need to identify the speaker in the text. An easy solution for the editor but a real complication for the designer. Now each character has to appear left to right in the order that they are speaking in each spread. It really constricts your layout options.