Me v Picture Book Text Design.
Every so often you come across a book where the picture book text is so well incorporated into the page it almost becomes part of the illustration and not just a means of delivering the story.
Have a look at these pages from my grandson’s copy of ‘The Little Boy who Lost his Name’.
I love how the text in the first picture follows the movement of the water and the mermaids hair in swirling lines. The irregularity of the size of the letters and the variation in the boldness of the font makes them interesting to look at.
In the second picture, the text complements the houses as it marches up the hill, whilst the huge word ‘Ants?’ emphasizes the little boys horror when the kindly Aardvark offers him some to eat. Brilliant.
My next book, Things Evie Eats, is a completely different design to Better Buckle Up. The illustrations are painted by an artist rather than being computer generated and I’ve tried to capture the lovely texture of the art paper she used for the pages of the book. This gives it an old-fashioned feel.
After spending so long perfecting the words of the manuscript, I wanted the layout of the text to be visually interesting so that actual letters add to the look of the book.
I chose a font which has simple letters similar to those used in early reading books. This should support letter recognition and help any early readers I might have. I felt this was important even though the book is most likely to be read aloud by parents, rather than by the children themselves,
Here’s a sneak peak at some of my pages.
Cheese Block Tower.
On this page I wanted the text to mimic the wibbly, wobbly tower that Evie builds with her cheese blocks.
Pouring milk down Mummy’s leg.
Here the text follows the milk and cereal as naughty Evie pours them down Mummy’s leg.
Squishy, squashy peas.
This makes use of a different size font and I tried to make the word ‘spoon’ into a spoon shape. This taxed my InDesign skills to the limit.
Spider’s web text.
This is the text that goes with last illustration. It took a while to suss out how achieve the spider’s web and make the text hover above it. Thankfully, my artist drew the ‘biscuit’ spider 🙂
I am not an expert in layout design. In most cases my ideas are greater than my skill set but am still pleased with how the book is shaping up … just a few more tweaks before it goes to the printers.
So, do you like wibbly, wobbly, squishy, squashy picture book text?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Suzie x
Pre-order Things Evie Eats for 20th July
Progress report 1 – Things Evie Eats
Just as I was getting used to the days of sunshine here in Wales, this was the view from my window this morning. You can’t see the rain sheeting down in this photo, but believe me, it was torrential. So, as there was no sun to distract me, I spent the day with my trusty laptop.
For those of you who don’t know, my next book is called Things Evie Eats and it’s about a little girl with very definite ideas on what she likes to eat.
Most of the pictures for the book are finished. I am waiting on revisions for just two pages from the artist. It’s been months since I mocked up the first draft of the book, a blend of images from the web and my less-than-artistic stick figures.
Me v an artist
Spot the difference?
Yeah, I’ll probably keep with the writing.
I’m super pleased with the watercolour images but getting them into InDesign required some resizing which was problematic because the paper was textured and if I shrunk or enlarged the image the texture got bigger and smaller too. Worse than that, if I shrunk the image too much the texture didn’t fill the page. Either the image had to cover the whole page or I had to cut the it out. I decided on the second option, which I didn’t really know how to do, so the process involved much complaining about Photoshop.
But then I decided I actually liked the effect of the images on the textured paper better, so I had to put a blank page behind the resized images: involving more complaining about Photoshop.
As well as learning how to remove the background from images, I also figured how to make text follow a line in InDesign, … and discovered the gutters on the house need cleaning out because they look like a waterfall.
However, the majority of the book is now laid out ready for printing. Not a bad effort for a stormy Saturday afternoon.
Suzie x
P.S Don’t forget I have an autographed copy of Better Buckle Up to giveaway over on Goodreads.
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Things Evie Eats …
… Day 20 May #AtoZfavbooks challenge.
Day 20 of the #AtoZfavbooks challenge features Things Evie Eats. (It’s not cheating to pick your own book, is it?)
I’m sure you all know a fussy eater. Well, Things Evie Eats is the story of a little girl with very definite ideas on the things she wants to eat.
When Evie decides she only wants to eat flowers, her big (-ish) brother comes to the rescue and keeps everyone happy.
I’ve had so much fun with food whilst writing this book which is due to be published in paperback and ebook on 20th July 2016. Sign up for the newsletter to catch the recipes for your own fussy eaters.
Suzie x
P.S. Don’t forget to share your favourite book title starting with the letter T in the comments below or post them on facebook or twitter with the hashtag #AtoZfavbooks so I can find them.