Creative Typography in Children's Books

With Gillian McClure and Lisa Kirkham

Lisa and Gillian showing a spread from Gillian's next book.

It is always nice to see everyone stream up the steps into the large room at St George’s through the Little Russell Street entry we’ve now become accustomed to. The huge blocks of carved lintels laying
across the courtyard just gives it more ambience. This time it was a smaller group than we’ve had though it didn’t make it any less intensive or exciting.

Gillian talking about text placement on spread from The Little White Sprite.

Gillian began by asking all of us where we were in our careers as children’s illustrators and writers, and then introduced herself as an author illustrator bringing three decades of picture book creation and publishing experience to the masterclass. Lisa Kirkham has an MA in Typography with a focus on typography for children’s literature. Both had an easy and inviting manner about them coupled with a shared passion for producing well designed children’s books in which text and image are beautifully integrated into the act of storytelling. Gillian felt that the typeface that Lisa had designed during her MA expressed in letterform her delicate rich illustrative style. That and Lisa as a designer forged their professional partnership.

Lisa showing how the text flow leads you from one page to the next in a triangular shape flowing from left to right.

Gillian and Lisa’s most important message is to consider text early, not as something added on late in the planning and creation process. Lisa and Gillian work together from the first roughs. Here are a few recommendations given at the workshop.

When deciding text placement, consider what is going on. Where you are in the story at that point. Blocks of text can give emotional intensity along with size and scale of the letterforms. Of course we are talking about the picture books as you will have blocks of text in older children’s books due to how much text there is. It is a good idea to try out various exercises in emphasis with your text using placement on the page, where the text is split and whether the image is used to split words or phrases much like a the use of a comma or full stop. Other ways text is split has to do with the form of a book, utilising the gutter and the page turn. Emphasis can also be effected by text or character size, weight (bold, regular, light), italic or not. Also, consider a thoughtful strategy, don't do things just because you can such as the use of too many typefaces. If the shock of using an unexpected typeface is used, why? Is it an important story element that adds to the experience of reading the picture book? Read your text out loud. How it sounds tells you something about how it needs to be treated in the image and on the page.

Lisa spoke about how working with text and image to a large extent is instinctual. I agree with her to a certain extent, but it also has a lot to do with developing an eye and ear for it. Developing an aesthetic to how a story is told at it’s best in the integration of text and image to a level that you are not aware of the expertise and skill that went into the making. Much like good writing. She left us with three important points to consider in every picture book; honour the content of the book; be aware and think about your audience; and read it aloud.

So many other things were discussed and shared including foreign rights and how that effects use of reversed text (white text) coloured text and handwritten texts.

Heather Kilgour, one of the attendees sharing her dummy for feedback.

Gillian had us do a couple of exercises that related directly to two of her upcoming books now in the planning stages. It was amazing to see how many different takes there were to the same text and the potential of using text as a story element.

The opening spread from The Little White Sprite written and illustrated by Gillian McClure.

Everyone had brought their own dummies to share and get feedback on during the last part of the masterclass. It was such a great opportunity not only to get feedback from Gillian and Lisa but how all of us pitched in with ideas and comments. This kind of creative hotbox is one of the earmarks, I think, of how giving illustrators at various stages of their careers are with each other. I also think this is an earmark of SCBWI as an organisation. To read more about Gillian and Lisa’s workflow and about Plaister Press, follow these links.

We even had a children's book editor in our midst! Listening and looking intently at one of the dummies presented.

We have three more Illustrator Masterclasses planned for this year, all promising to be as inspiring and informative as the last one. The Portfolio Intensive is the next one on the 25 June in London.

Illustrating Michael Rosen

By Mike Brownlow
I was very pleased to be asked to illustrate a story by Michael Rosen for a book that’s being put together on behalf of the Bristol Children’s Hospital.


Contributors include Jacqueline Wilson, Alexander McCall Smith, Julia Donaldson, Michael Morpurgo, Anne Fine, Nichola Bayley, Quentin Blake, Michael Foreman, Emma Chichester Clark, Nick Sharratt and several others.

The story is called 'The Worst Cough In The World', and this is the illustration I came up with. It was nice to work in black and white again. It's the first purely B/W drawing I've done in ages.

Sketchcrawl: more York images

Some more sketches from the York Sketchcrawl. These are by Catriona Tippin.

Sketchcrawl: York by Sam Zuppardi

On 7th May SCBWI members in the York area got together for their first Sketch-crawl and Scrawl-crawl (for writers). Twelve members of the North-East group walked the city walls and worked on drawings and writing inspirations, reports say it was an enriching experience.

Here are some sketches made by one of the participants Sam Zuppardi.

Bologna Book Fair 2011: The World of Storytelling is Changing

By Bridget Strevens Marzo

Well I promised to write it up for SCBWI BI so I took pages of notes at the 2011 Bologna Book Fair's first ever Tools of Change for Publishing Conference entitled "The World of Storytelling is Changing". 

Big thanks to Bologna's Roberta Chinni and Neal Hoskins, of  Winged Chariot Press who specializes in beautiful children's translated picture books for  organizing this new conference.  Big news at the Fair afterwards by the way, in case you missed it on the Bookseller, was that WInged Chariot  has joined forces with Walker Books. 

But how to sum up so much talk  in a digestible nugget for all of us time-skint skim readers?   

Everyone will have a different angle but I'll start slowly with O'Reilly Media's Joe Wickert  who welcomed us early last Sunday morning.  
Early television, he said, took a while to develop its own identity, distinct from the radio format it began by emulating.  Now similarly  we are witnessing the early days of  a new form of media.  That said, we are still all about storytelling.

Hum. If there was a story to this day, it was a opening chapter with many paths to follow and no sign of a neat plot or ending.  The main characters in Bologna were book publishers and digital developers looking at the marketplace, sharing their experience from their many different perspectives, and deciding how to come to terms with new publishing formats and  tools that are still evolving rapidly.    

With this inevitably comes jargon. From e-pub to android devices and more.
But first, there's a clear difference between e-books which at their simplest are basicially scrollable PDF files of printed books, and apps  -  applications which can take an enormous variety of forms, not just games or enhanced books.

I wonder how many  'primary content providers'  - authors and illustrators from the children's book industry  - were there? 

Why did I go?  On a personal level, because I've got an app project of my own,  and I was curious to go back to the Future having experienced the  pre history of  CD Roms.   
After my first children's books were published in the 1990s, I landed a rare salaried job in Paris,brainstorming and storyboarding ideas for 'quality' CD-Roms for children.   I think I did better than the company investors.  They paid for my first Mac.  Once that bubble burst two or so years later, I was happy to return to books and magazines.  But I still have a  few of the best, authored CD-Roms on my shelf, by David Macaulay, Claude Delafosse and Roman Victor-Pujebet who paved the way for now, pushing the constraints of that medium  to imaginative and playful levels. 

I was curious to see if there was any connection.  Of course CD-Roms are the skeletons in the cupboard.  No one in publishing wants to be reminded of  the time and money wasted on them.     Nevertheless, we did learn a few things about that overused word, interactivity.  We  learnt for a start to be dismissive about  the worst excesses of  "click and chirp"  animation that children quickly tired of, way back,  and seem to be resurfacing in digital books at the touch of a finger on the screen.  

But this wasn't the time or place to discuss  content  - and the quality of interaction -  at any length.    Everyone is still dealing with rapidly changing parameters, the tools, as O'Reilly rightly says, but just the tools, of change.

So here are just a few key notes I made...and if you want more, or want to correct me, please fire away!

Keynote speaker, internationally-known UK publisher Kate Wilson started us off with an impressive battery of facts, figures and market studies.  She founded Nosy Crow a year ago and it's growing strong.   Their Three Little Pigs app is now out, and Cinderella is on its way, alongside their book list.  

Her recent statistics revealed the sharp rise in digital book buying in the US, with the UK  lagging behind, though still slightly ahead of the rest of the world.   
She talked of  traditional book buying going down in the UK mainly due to TV.   But can my notes be right? Does the average UK child really watch 2 hours of television a day?   

The increase in online buying of books means less impulse buying which is one reason for lower sales.  Book stores, she said, need to think about how to create a greater experience to attract customers. 
But how to attract people to digital books?   You can't ignore the power of free and cheap so she believes in creating "lite"  versions as tasters to tempt people to buy and download the full version later.  Most other publishers referred to the need for buyers to sample free 'hooks' or tasters.  
Social media like Facebook are increasingly important for promotion.  Authors who WERE interested in digital books need to be aware of their own role in this.  But there is also a rise of  niche critics - the mavens -  offering a new source of opinion,"uncorrupt real people on independant forums whose opinion you can trust ".  The gatekeepers are changing too.   

I'm glad I attended the popular breakout session "The Co-Production Model. Best Practices for Collaborating on eBook and App development " because it was the first time that day I'd heard the name of a specific author-illustrator.  This was Lizbeth Zwerger, whose Little Mermaid has been  developed digitally by Umesh Shukla of Auryn Inc in a beautiful co-release with Michael Neugebauer, founder of Mineditions and formerly of North South books.  I had stumbled upon Auryn/Minedition's app Teddy's Day a month ago and bought it because it looked warm and intriguing.  I wasn't disappointed.  There were a lot more than "tap and chirp" in the interactions I found in Teddy's room. For example, you could paint a picture you  in a little sub activity of the story, and then see it  appear reduced at the back of Teddy's room, pinned up on the wall.  

Of the other breakouts, I thought the Moms with Apps presentation the most clear and interesting.   This is a loose group of independent creators in the US, mothers, fathers, teachers so passionate about educating their children, during a period of educational cutbacks, that they have all  created apps of different kinds mostly to make learning fun in original ways.  Though lacking the track record and backlist of book publishers, the focus of their work is children, including those with special needs, more than financial gain. Their group site is worth looking at and you can now download an app which is actually a catalogue of all their peer-approved apps.

Martin Salisbury's afternoon keynote, Digital Picturebooks, An Artist's Perspective, was a feast after all the  flow charts.  Professor of Illustration for the MA Children's Book Illustration at the Cambridge School of Art and author of some great books about illustration, he described himself as a dinosaur in the digital world, showing some great examples of interaction in the traditional picture  book form.  He raised some questions as to content.  Could narrative structure and the new idea of interactivity be opposing forces?  How will we fill those  gaps  between pictures or page turns that leave us a space to imagine in the way that Scott McCloud describes so well in his Understanding Comics?   He stressed how vital it was to think of this digital book or app, creatively, as an entirely new media.   I agree!

And he ended with the back of Lane Smith's book....

Can it text?  Blog? Scroll?


Perfect prelude to the days at the Fair, about which more later!
And big closing news from Roberta Chinni.  Next year there'll be two  new Bologna awards -   one for an ebook and one for an app.  Watch this space content providers!

Bridging images by Bridget Strevens-Marzo: Tools of Change Bologna March 27, 2011

New Idea: the Tour de Sketch

By Lynne Chapman

On Sunday, we tried out a new sketching idea in Derbyshire, just outside Sheffield. Instead of our usual monthly SketchCrawl, we tried it on bikes. A group called Pedal Ready, associated with the Peak Park, sponsored us by providing free bike hire, which was great, because it meant everyone could have a go. 24 people turned up at 9.30am at Hassop's ex-railway station.


The 1st sketching stop was just 10 minutes away at the old Thornbridge Station:

Apparently, in its day, it was a private station for the exclusive use of the residents of the adjacent Thornbridge Hall (!). Next we continued to a spot where the path opened to lovely, long views across rolling farmland:
We had a longer run next, to where there was a twisted, old birch tree in a picnic area: We rode back to the cafe at Hassop Station for lunch, as it was too chilly to picnic, then had another slightly longer run afterwards, out to where the trail ends, at Coombs Road viaduct. The sun was trying to come out and it was getting quite warmer, so we sat on the grass, beside a field full of springy, new lambs, and spent about 50 minutes on our final sketch of the day: Then it was back to Hassop for a well-earned cuppa, where we sat round a big table and slowly passed all our sketchbooks around the circle. It was a real feast: big books, tiny books, all kinds of styles, rich with ink and watercolour, charcoal and pencil (as usual, I will post other people's work up in my Picture Gallery as they send it in. We'll certainly be trying that idea again!

Sketchbook project: on tour in the U.S.

By Anne-Marie Perks

In this post I thought I would share a peek into the sketchbook I submitted for Sketchbook Project 2011. The theme I chose was Nighttime Stories. I knew I wanted to work in black and white with touches of one or two colours, and I knew that I wanted a narrative thread to hold it all together.

At right is one page of my storyboard thumbnails outlining the theme loosely to a Native American myth on bringing the first light to the world.



In this tale, animals and people could change between being human or animal at will and the moon was a woman who hung upside down in the sky. Above, the ravens love their blackness and wish to keep the world dark.


An interesting challenge was to show the human form connected to their animal forms. Here, the Wolf People want warmth and light and are dressed in their wolf skins.

Above, the confrontation between Raven and Wolf as Moon Woman looks on. Wolf had gone to Moon Woman to ask how they could bring light to the world.

The battle between the Ravens and Wolf to free Moon Woman's brother, the Sun from the cave they had imprisoned him in.

Interestingly, 28,839 blank sketchbooks were sent out from the Art House Co-op and just under 10,000 sketchbooks were sent back. These books will be kept in a permanent collection at the Brooklyn Library, cataloged and each has an ISBN number. It is amazing to think of original art being something you can check out. Currently, the exhibit has been in Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas - next stop Portland, Maine. By the time the tour wraps up at the end of July 2011, the exhibit will have been all across the United States. A tour diary is on the website along with the portfolios and sketchbook submissions of all the artists that participated. It has been truly exciting to be part of this project reminding me that I can do a lot of work in a short amount of time when needed. Follow the link to see more of my sketchbook.