OUGD 602 - Pirate childrens book, layout development

After getting all the images correct and fitting them to the correct page I had the next job or creating a suitable layout to display the type with. I wanted it to have quite a chaotic look to it as I feel this will appeal to the target audience of kids more. I also wanted the layout to be well thought out with thought going into how you would read the page. One thing I have outlined in earlier posts is that this children's book contained much more text than the other books I have based my research on. This gives me more of an oportunity to play around with layouts and text positioning but its also more of a challenge in terms of creating subtable layouts that work in conjunction with the images of the book.

As you can see from these spreads taken from the final book that I have tried to incorporate some more creative layouts mixed with some more standard ones to give the book some balance. On some of the pages I decided to individually place the lets of some of the words to give a sense of how the word is said to put some emotion into the story line

These are just a couple of examples from the book, whats interesting though is that this was something we were taught in our first year on the course. Fred did a seminar on how type can do more than just say a word. Different fonts used with different sized letters can provoke a accent or a certain way of saying the word, this is something that stuck with me and something I have tried to incorporate into this book. Another adition I added to bring some of the pages together was the addition of the water colour splashes. Originally I wanted to add coloured background to most of the pages because i felt the book lacked something when I finished doing the layout design and illustrations. On a different edit of the book I added in too much of the water colour and could clearly see that it was too much and in many cases unnecessary. From going through the book I decided that a lot of the white nagative space actually added to the pages, It made the book more legible which is the most important thing when designing a childrens book. I went back through the book and took out the woater colour splashes on any pages it didnt work on. Some pages on the other hand `i felt like it needed it to add to the illustrations on the page.

This page for example I feel the explosion of colour goes really well with the story thats being told and the actions being made by the character on the page.