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Details regarding the books mentioned in this document
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- Physical structure of a printed book
- pages vs. sheets
- With the exception of short runs of cheaply produced publications (such as a newsletter run off on a laser printer or copier), the size of the sheet on which the impression is made is larger than the size (known as the trim size) of the pages in the finished book.
- After the large printed sheets emerge from the press, they are folded to create signatures. One or more bound and trimmed signatures add up to a book.
- reader spreads vs. printer spreads
- The sequence of pages seen while reading the book generally does not match the sequence in which the pages are printed.
- In the former case, we are dealing with reader spreads: page 1 faces the last page of the front matter, page 3 faces page 2, etc.
- In the latter case (printer spreads), the sequence is determined by the way the book will be bound. Assuming a 16-page signature (the basic building block of many picture books), page 1 faces page 16, page 2 faces page 15, etc.) After the printed sheet is folded and cut, the pages appear in the proper reader-spread order.
- An awareness of the printer spreads used for the book may lead you to reconsider your layout--since images that cross from one page to the next will work best if the facing pages are kept together in printing.
- imposition
- The actual arrangement of the printer spreads on the sheet is called imposition, and varies with the size and type of the printing and binding equipment.
- You should be aware of the imposition whenever technical issues concerning adjacent pages arise. Color-correction for an image on page 2, for instance, may affect images on page 15, while leaving pictures on page 1 unaltered.
- paper choice
- Show-through refers to the opacity of the paper--whether material printed on one side of the sheet is visible on the opposite side. Picture books are often printed on relatively heavy stock to minimize show-through.
- Brightness indicates how white the paper is. Greater brightness improves the contrast of the image.
- Finish ranges from rough textures to coated or glossy surfaces. The latter support finer details and sharper, more contrasty halftones. On the other hand, the glare reflected off of a glossy page interferes with reading.
- Most paper selections are made with the goal of reproducing accurately and attractively the original artwork. Unusual surfaces, however, can impart additional interest to the image, as shown by the lightly speckled paper used in "One hole in the road".
- Picture book constraints
- Rules, and when to break them
- Before we try our hand at laying out our work, we'll see some constraints worth bearing in mind as we start planning. There are some common standards in picture book publishing. These are largely dictated, as we'll see more closely in a later class, by printing requirements. While many taboos have been dismantled by new technologies and the globalization of the printing industry, a consideration of what is typical is still important.
- Consider that a new author is already asking the publishing house to take a significant risk--picture books, which these days are almost invariably full-color jobs, are inherently expensive to produce. Working within established parameters lowers costs, making the newcomer's book more viable.
- Size, scale, and shape
- While in the past there were many restrictions on the size and shape (vertical, horizontal, square) of the book, these seem greatly relaxed nowadays. A given publisher may still have specific requirements, based perhaps on how well the book fits retailers' shelves.
- For an example of an extreme departure from standard formats, see Maurice Sendak's elongated dummy, p.81 of "The Art of Maurice Sendak". Note, however, that this dummy did not become a published book.
- The size of the finished book, and the size of the artwork created by the illustrator, are fairly independent. Most artwork is slightly reduced for a 'tighter' look, but enlargements are also used.
- It is however essential to maintain the same proportions--or part of the image may end up cropped off.
- A concern with visual scale may be a driving force in the story--yet not require an unusual trim size. See for instance "Elephant buttons", "June 29, 1999".
- Picture book design and layout
- Layout formats
- Full-spread or full-page illustrations
- 'Full-bleed' indicates that the image extends to the very edge of the page. To allow for imprecisions in cutting, part of the image (devoid of essential elements) must extend beyond the trim size--this extra amount is called the 'bleed'.
- Illustrations which do not bleed may be framed. In some cases, such as "The book that Jack wrote", the frame becomes part of the story.
- Panels
- three-d boxes within boxes: "Snapshots from the Wedding"
- balloon-less comic strip: "Muffin Pigdoom and the Keeper"
- speech balloons used for asides:
- "Julius, the Baby of the World"
- "There's an Awful Lot of Weirdos in our Neighborhood"
- "Fred": straight comic strip
- Unusual formats
- The author's postscript to "Upside-downers: more pictures to stretch the imagination" explains:
"We've also added a new dimension to the book by printing some of our wordplays upside-down... so a child can sit opposite his mother and they can both read the book to each other at the same time."
- Staying out of the gutter
- The area on either side of the seam (the vertical centerline of the spread, where the pages are bound) is called the 'gutter'. Problems arise when the image crosses the gutter--the extent of the problem varies with the type of binding (as we'll see in a later class), but we must always take it into consideration when designing our composition.
- Misalignments can occur whenever the two pages in a spread are printed on separate sheets (this is true of the majority of spreads). The problem is made worse when sharply defined features and a tightly controlled style make imperfections stand out.
- The inner margins of the pages can be 'pinched' in the binding, effectively hiding a portion of the image. The only remedy is to make sure that nothing essential to the understanding of the image is in its exact center. Careful coordination with the print shop can tell you which spreads will suffer less from this problem--but an edition of the book bound differently will throw off these calculations.
- Designing spreads vs. designing pages
- Unlike most other types of books, the exact pagination is critical for a picture book and won't change in the design process. Accordingly, we are allowed--and indeed encouraged, to think of each pair of facing pages (a 'spread') as a single unit. Both pages will be revealed to the reader at the same time, and the images can extend from one to the other (keeping in mind the caveats about gutter problems).
- Allowing for text
- Column-inches
- This is a measurement of the estimated space required to fit the text. It is affected by such variables as the typeface, type size, and word count. It tells you how many inches tall the text is, assuming a known 'column measure' (the width of the text block). For longer texts, the column-inches may exceed the height of the page--the text in this case is broken into two or more side-by-side blocks called 'columns'.
- Design grid
- Pre-established layout guidelines are uncommon for fiction picture books, which are usually handled as one-of-a-kind projects. However, if the book is part of a series--especially a non-fiction work with longer text--it may need to conform to a 'grid'.
- Typography and lettering
- The actual typesetting specifications are the responsibility of the book designer, a job at times performed by the art director. In cases where the type and the images are very tightly integrated, the artist may need/want to take a more active role.
- For an example of hand-lettered text, see "Pish posh, said Hieronymus Bosch".
- Basic terminology
- Terms related to the specification of type: face, style, size.
- Terms related to the parts of letterforms: x-height, baseline, ascenders, descenders, stems, strokes, counters.
- Terms related to the overall appearance of the typeface: serif, sans-serif, slab serif; modern, old style, transitional; book, display, script, ornamental.
- Terms related to the setting of type: alignment, justification, leading, tracking, kerning, margins, indentation, paragraph spacing, word breaks (and hyphenation).
- References and resources
- "The alphabet abecedarium"
- A profusion of details and illustrations concerning the lore and significance of each alphabetical character. Any number of ideas for your lettering project can be found within. In fact, its narrative style and engrossing anecdotes may well suggest ideas for your next picture book. And you thought type was boring...
- "The elements of typographic style"
- "Stop stealing sheep and find out how type works"
- "Typography now: the next wave"
- Keep in mind that picture book typography may violate some of the standard guidelines. For instance, the body type in "The wicked prince" is set in all caps--a practice generally discouraged by type design textbooks.
- Number of pages
- Typical picture book: two 16-page signatures, with or without separate endpapers.
- Note that board books are printed and bound differently, and are not tied to the same rules. A typical board book will have approximately half as many pages as a picture book. See for instance "Zoom City". Other categories not subject to the standard page number limit include non-fiction and poetry collections.
- "Shortcut" is an interesting exception: the ratio of text-to-images is the normal one for a picture book (each spread includes one full-page, full-bleed illustration; the facing page carries a smaller illustration and 1 to 3 lines of text). However, the book is longer than usual (4 signatures, 16 pages each), and it is divided into 9 chapters and an epilogue.
- Front matter
- Standard Elements
- Half title page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Dedication page
- A non-fiction book may have additional front matter elements (table of contents, list of illustrations), as well as back matter elements (index, list of references or bibliography, glossary, appendices).
- Possible combinations
- Of the above elements, the ones that are always present are the title page, and--at least in recent books, which typically include CIP (cataloging in publication) data--the copyright page. The title page is always a recto (right-hand) page. The traditional position for the copyright page is the verso (back) of the title page. Formerly stringent legal requirements are now apparently more relaxed--so it is not uncommon to see copyright notices elsewhere, such as on the last page of the book (see "Drop Dead").
- The half title page, when present, is another recto page. The dedication is traditionally a recto page as well, but may appear elsewhere (see "Drop Dead" again--where it faces the title page)
- Given that the optional elements may be omitted or combined (e.g., the dedication may appear on the copyright page); that the front matter may be padded with blank verso pages; and that the endpapers may or may not be separate sheets--it turns out that even if the total number of pages is set, there is still a wide range of 'usable' pages for the actual story. Start with the total (32), and subtract:
- In a book which is short on material, make the endpapers part of the signature (minus 4), use all front matter elements (minus 4 again), put blank pages on the verso of the dedication and half title pages (minus 2): the space to fill just shrunk to 22 pages.
- In a book which is short on space, make the endpapers separate (subtract nothing), keep title and copyright pages (minus 2), drop the rest of the ballast, and you can soar in a vast 30-pages expanse.
- In fact, you can also start some of the action on the 'forbidden pages' (see "Once Upon a Time", where the initial scene is spread across both the title and copyright pages).
- Take it even further--the irrepressible Maira Kalman scatters bits of story-within-the-story as far as the dust jacket flaps and the back cover of "Swami on Rye". In "Mind-boggling machines and amazing mazes", even the UPC bar code is part of an elaborate back cover illustration.
- Storyboard and book dummy
- Chapter 6 of "Writing with Pictures"
- Two planning tools are most commonly used at this stage: storyboards and book dummies, and we'll see in class the trade-offs between them.
- To better understand Shulevitz's discussion of storyboards, you may want to get a copy of his book "Dawn", which he uses as an example.
- One objection I have to the otherwise excellent discussion of the topic in your textbook concerns color.
- Shulevitz specifically recommends doing the storyboards in black and white to focus on the essentials. It might be just as essential, though, to work out in advance how color evolves along the course of the story.
- Consider perhaps a separate storyboard, again very simple--just a few swatches of color for each page to establish the overall mood.
- Visual continuity
- In "Bunny cakes", Max's repeated trips to the grocery build a consistent image of the environment of the story: we always see Max running from left to right. The house and the store have fixed places in this imaginary world.
- In the same book, there is an example of consistent viewpoint switch. On p.22 we see the scene from inside the house: Ruby is on the left, Max is on the right; on p.23 we see the same scene from outside the house: Ruby is now on the right and Max on the left.
- Emotional consistency
- Impending doom--even when things are looking up ("The Coming of the Surfman")
- Computers as a planning aid
- This section is not concerned with the use of the computer to make the actual pictures for the book. Computers as an art medium are just one of many choices available to illustrators, as we'll see in a separate session.
- Text outline programs
- These programs, unlike word processors, focus on the structure of the text, rather than its appearance. They may be useful in organizing disconnected ideas into a coherent whole.
- The low-tech replacement for these tools is a stack of index cards and a corkboard. For fiction picture books the low-tech approach is perfectly adequate. For fiction works with longer, more structured texts, the choice of low- or hi-tech is dependent on your comfort level--choose whichever gets you closer to your goal without getting tangled in an overly-complicated process.
- Raster graphics programs with layers
- These programs (such as Photoshop) allow you to scan sketches from various sources, then resize, reposition, re-orient, excerpt and recombine them to arrive at the final composition.
- As an added bonus, if you do decide to use the computer to create your pictures, a raster program is the most likely choice for working in a wide variety of styles.
- There are alternatives to the expensive commercial programs. If your computer runs UNIX (or its open-source look-alike, Linux) consider using GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program). It is a freely distributed piece of software available at www.gimp.org that can perform many of the same functions as Photoshop.
- An accessible book covering this program is "Guerrilla guide to great graphics with the Gimp".
- The low-tech alternative is a light table--provided you sketch on vellum or other translucent material.
- Vector graphics programs
- Programs in this category (Illustrator, FreeHand) allow you to diagram, and easily reshape, the visual elements in your composition.
- On the other hand, they offer far more limited control on scanned materials--they are more beneficial if you intend to do your initial sketches directly on the computer.
- Not everyone will take to these programs as a tool for final artwork, since they tend to have a more marked influence on the style of the imagery.
- Think of them as a replacement for pen-and-ink and airbrushes, rather than a painterly medium.
- There is no direct counterpart in traditional tools for the experience of using these programs. It's one application area where software designers had to come up with their own rules rather than borrowing from real-world precedents.
- For many beginners, using these programs well may present a significant challenge.
- Page layout programs
- A program like PageMaker, QuarkXPress, or InDesign may be useful if you intend to handle typography yourself. But given the short text in most picture book fiction projects, a vector graphics program (or even the most recent versions of some raster programs) would work just as well.
- The traditional approach to typesetting and paste-up was to hand it off to specialists. If you do not intend to use the computer for this purpose, your best option by far is still to let someone else do it.
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Details regarding the books mentioned in this document
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