Laura Moyer, a Lancaster County artist, has designed the Amazon Holiday Kids Gift Book this year

If you are a parent in the United States, chances are Laura Moyer dropped into your mailbox in October. Or at least her art did, when millions of Americans received Share the Joy, the Amazon Holiday Kids Gift Book.

The Lancaster County-based commercial artist decked the catalog in a “forest friends” theme for the world’s largest online retailer.

Interspersed among the toy book’s 95 pages — selling 700+ toys from Godzilla action figures to Pets Alive Mama Duck Surprise — are Moyer’s lively renderings of the catalog’s long-standing characters: Fox, Bear, Raccoon, Mouse, and Owl.

The book kicks off with the forest friends wrapping gifts (as Owl loops a pine cone garland above), until a gust of wind blows all the gift tags away — instigating a predicament that’s illustrated and resolved in the print gift guide’s successive pages.

Saturated in the jewel tones of old Disney films, Moyer’s creatures effect a charming simplicity: there’s a fox with his ears akimbo, a raccoon with workmen’s gloves, a mouse full of gusto, and a fringe-feathered, mellow owl. “Her work is tactile, special, more engaging than [a virtual catalog or] things going by on a screen,” said Caleb Kozlowski, a creative director at Hybrid Design, the agency tasked with finding the illustrator from thousands of strong candidates.

Ever since Amazon launched its hard copy mass mailing in 2018, these woodland creatures have frolicked through the toy book pages. “Amazon is protective of these characters and how they’re represented,” said Kozlowski. “We wanted to do right by them.”

After conducting a wide search, Kozlowski said he was drawn to Moyer’s clean, thoughtful, geometric style, with its “lively, optimistic” color palette, which reminded him of works by legendary Disney animator Mary Blair. He also liked that Moyer’s work contrasted with hand-drawn work featured the year before — “Laura’s style … [has] a simplicity, but it didn’t feel mechanical.”

“Racoon is a builder who likes to make things, so he wears construction gloves. Bear is more subdued and wears slippers, and doesn’t want to leave the house and should be hibernating, so is tucked into a sweater,” Koslowski explained.

The Amazon Holiday Kids Gift Book reaches millions of homes. And while Moyer still has local clients, ranging from Levengoods of Lancaster and Thomas Jefferson University to the Union League of Philadelphia, and global clients such as Disney and Pixar, she wasn’t always on the path to illustrating cans of lime-ginger cider and worldwide catalogs.

Moyer drew and painted throughout her childhood in New Jersey and North Carolina — she still has the frilly red ribbon she won for her picture of Raggedy Ann when she was 8. However, in college she lost faith in making a career of art.

During her first semester as a graphic design major at the University of Delaware, she got “spooked,” she said. She was 18 and overwhelmed and doodled a lot. Moyer graduated with a degree in elementary education. The self-confessed introvert re-enrolled in college, this time in the design program at Thomas Jefferson (at the time it was Philadelphia University) and got her second bachelor’s degree.

Her own “fussiness” pushed her to illustrate digitally (vs. by hand drawing on paper), which gives her the control she wants — and a style that later attracted Kozlowksi and Amazon.

Moyer, whose favorite color is yellow, lives in an intentionally neutral-toned home in Manheim, Pa., because her color-filled mind is “jam-packed” and she finds navy blue stressful. For work, she wears neutrally toned clothes, and sits at a computer bedecked with her grandparents’ cat figurines in the corner of her family’s loft. Nearby are books by her illustrator heroes Mary Blair and Alain Gree, as well as assorted Little Golden Books and Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, which she sometimes pages through for inspiration.

When Moyer’s copy of the Amazon gift guide arrived, her kids (ages 7 and 10) were thrilled, not just because the back page featured a picture of their mom, but because the family received multiple copies. This meant that each child had their own copy to flip though and circle desired items. An additional treat was seeing the characters they had watched evolve throughout spring and summer, now prancing and ambling across the book’s pages, and also available for purchase as stuffed animals.

Large screen prints and three-dimensional montages of Moyer’s creations fill the windows of New York City’s Amazon building on Fifth Avenue.

Moyer’s son’s favorite character is Bear, because he seems “kind and cozy,” while her daughter prefers Fox, “because Fox fixes problems and thinks of ideas.”

Moyer said she identifies the most with Raccoon — creative yet a little scatterbrained and always thinking.

This article has been updated to accurately state the color of Moyer’s prize ribbon, her list of clients, and that she wasn’t the first out-of-house designer to design the mailer. The article has also been updated to accurately state the gift guide’s name and readership figures.