Fonts and Typography

After doing my research and looking at existing examples of children's picture books I found that typography had a big impact and was used a lot to convey different feelings and expressions of words. Either to make the type more visually appealing or to convey some sort of feeling or how the word should be said.

For example a lot of books used different fonts when using an onomatopoeic word to emphasize the sound effect. Some other examples I found were when using adjectives, for example the word small would be printed in a smaller font than the rest of the sentence and vice versa for the word big.

http://popularprint.org/wordpress/massie/2013/02/08/typography-in-childrens-books/

This article on typography was really helpful to me. I think it's interesting to think about typography and the effect it can have on the reader. It also occurred to me while reading that children's books really are the only books that really take advantage of using typography for effect. I suppose this is because they are very visual and use the text as an extension of the images because the children who are reading them cannot always read or are learning to read. The use of typography may help children to learn what the word means more easily if the word visually looks like what the word means.

Typography is definitely something I have considered when putting type onto my images. For example in the following scenes from my animation.

I wanted to emphasise the word 'really' so I made it a bigger font size and to add to that I also changed the type face in order to make it clear that it was the stressed part of the sentence. I also pushed back the word 'miss' by making it a bit more transparent than the rest to add a visual aspect to the word. As his sister is gone I made the word look like it was beginning to be gone too.

I also made the title of the narrative very visual. In the animation the title will appear gradually like it's being spelled out with stars and appearing as a message to Hugo. I wanted it to appear like a message from Lily to Hugo as this is the most important message in the story, to remember her happily.