Tracy Beaker

Initial thoughts and competition

Before undertaking this task, I wanted to research how books in the same genre and targeting the same audience. I wanted to explore how they used their typography and imagery to capture the imagination of the audience. I then used this information to impact on how I carried out my Tracey Beaker assignment and made sure it was to the same standard and could stand aside the competition in a bookstore.

Books targeted at a similar age range include Roald Dahl books, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, David Walliams books, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and The Worst Witch to name a few. I used these books as a base to look at how they typeset the text and how images were set into the text and helped tell the story.

With Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the text is aligned to the left, with the leading quite sizable between lines to allow space for clarity. The font is serif, looking handwritten, as if been written by the character to engage with the audience. The images are relevant to what is been said on the page and are wrapped under the text.

When looking at David Walliams books, they also follow a similar pattern, wrapping most images under text. These books however use a sans serif font, looking less personal as the stories are often in third person, however there is use of bold and large font to emphasis certain words, this is mainly done for humour in these books. Both the Diary of a Wimpy Kid and David Walliams books both use the imagery and the way the text appears on the page to reflect the characters in the books and show their personality. While the images draw your attention first, they are not overwhelming on the page and do not distract from the story, while also being able to add to it. I noticed that all the pictures were also always central or if not, were always far from the edges to avoid looking unsightly and being cropped with printed.

Roald Dahl similarly uses a sans serif font, however, often also uses less images throughout, with only certain pages having images on and this not being a regular occurrence.

Harry Potter has no images in throughout on the original books, however, does use certain imagery on chapter headings. When looking in bookshops, I noticed this a lot; if the book did not have images throughout, mostly in this age range there would still be some imagery used at the start of chapters.

I also wanted to look at how other Jacqueline Wilson books had been typeset, to make sure my decisions fit in with Jacqueline’s brand and how her audiences expect her books to be presented. I choose The Sleepover Club and too notice of the way her images were more randomly placed on the page and often integrated with the words.

Overall, I found the exercise very useful to give me a base of knowledge on what was out there and what would be competing with Tracy. This paired with what I have learnt with Ness will hopefully allow me to apply this to my assignment and make the right decisions for the typesetting of a book of this genre. I feel I want to be able to use the typography to express Tracy Beakers humour and naughtiness a little bit and use design alongside what is been written to tell the story. I also want to make sure the images I use fit in with what is been said on the page. I also need to make sure the images are not close to the edge of the page, overlapping or overwhelming on the page.

Fonts

I started the process by setting up the correct sized InDesign document and placing the text on the page. I made sure my baseline grid was on and then initially started experimenting with fonts and sizes to see how this would all fit together on the page.

I decided I wanted to do Tracy’s answers to her journal questions in a handwriting type font, as if she was filling in the book and therefore use a san serif font for the questions/headings and title.

I really liked Bradley ICT for the main body of text as I felt it represented handwriting as the story is being told/ written by Tracy, it gives a more personal touch and also the book is almost like a diary/questionnaire being filled in by Tracy which she is likely to have filled out by hand if this was real life. I also liked how the text is rounded, which flows on the page and also is still quite easy for children to read, especially in a bigger font. This choice was also made because as I knew the assignment required lots of images to be placed, looking at competition, those with lots of images often used a more personal, serif font. Once I had this text, I started to experiment with other fonts to see which fit alongside.

In the end I really like how Georgia looked, in regular and bold, and felt this was a font I had seen in use for children’s books before.

Knowing what I have learnt about children’s books this year and looking at explains in the shops, children’s margins in books are quite large, to allow for pictures to be added and to make sure the text does not get pushed too close to the edge of the page during this process. I therefore made amendments to my margins and the layout of the page to make sure this adhered to the ideal set up for a children’s book and to allow me to avoid errors as I went along with the process of typesetting.

I set up the Master pages with the margins while also placing a boarder and the page numbers in so these would appear throughout the document. I also added in two columns, as, although I would not be using the columns to set the text, I felt it gave the page a centre and guide for setting the text and images.

Once had decided on fonts, I then started to create paragraph and character styles which I could then apply to the whole document.

While doing this I wanted to not only pre-set fonts and sizes but also make sure leading and kerning were appropriate to make sure spacing helped the text be more legible, while also sitting on the page well.

Images

Once I had an initial idea of how the text would look, I knew I could start placing images to see how it worked alongside the text. I made sure to edit all pictures in Photoshop first, making sure they were all in Greyscale and saved at Photoshop documents as well as removing backgrounds for some extra images to make sure they would fit over text easily and making the task easier as I went along.

At first, I just played with some of the extra images provided to see how I could integrate these with the titles, headings and breaking up the pages.

I then started on the actual images, reading through the text carefully to make sure I was placing the images in the right section of the book. This was something I found really difficult because I wanted to make sure I was making the right choices for the work to fit with the brief but also what is expected of a Jacqueline Wilson book. I carried on placing images until I was happy with the initial layout of the book.

I decided to place a swirl at the end of every section, while using a background drawing to place under the headings of the next sections. I felt this helped the book flow and help the read identify the next section of the book.

I also used the images to help break up the texts, so it wasn’t always in rectangular blocks. Wrapping images in the text was just personal choice on what I felt look best, however, I did sometimes “jump object” wrap the text so that the image created gaps and spaces between the different sections or if certain next headings started at the bottom of pages, but sometimes this was unavoidable.

I found it very tricky when you moved objects around, they would have a knock-on effect to other pages and I had to edit many pages at a time. I was unsure about the first few spreads and deliberated over these for quite some time.

I decided to place the first image as a first page as this was something, I noticed had been done in other Jacqueline Wilson books. A black and white copy of the cover would be placed as a recto chapter opener. I then knew I didn’t want to place the text on the left-hand page, so decided to use more images on this page to show the title of the book and then begin the text on the 3^rd page. I tried to make a call on what I had seen in print before, but I wasn’t sure if I should have just started with the text, however I felt the images flowed here and fit in with the start of the story.

I liked this page as I liked placing the image of Tracy next to a few swirls as if Tracy had been doodling around a picture of herself.

I also enjoyed the use of the images on this page as Tracy shows off a picture she has drawn at school and I used some of the star images we were given to place these over the top to look as if the picture has been stuck into the book by the stars. Tracy also mentions she thinks the picture is worth 2 gold stars, so I thought it was sweet to only use 2 stars to stick it to the page. However, I don’t like how the “Being in Care” section begins at the bottom of the page or is an orphan and I wanted to avoid pressing enter and moving the text out of its original set.

Overall, I am quite happy with how the typesetting assignment went, I really enjoyed working with exciting images and very funny text to try and create something that is ready for sale. I felt that I was able to use all of the images in the correct places and place them in more interesting ways than just underneath text, which is what I saw in some examples from the competition. I struggled with placement of the images at the start of the document but think I came to compromise with this. I think I found it most difficult not editing the text sent by the author, as sometimes the text would finish at the end of a page and even when trying to manipulate this by adding images or editing the leading, still sometimes was not possible to overcome, which I think really let some of my pages down. If carrying this out again I would make sure that I perhaps tried changing the fonts during the process of placing the images if the text is creating orphans or widowers when changing the sizes, fonts and adding in pictures, although this sometimes cannot be avoid, I would have like to try and avoid this through more experimenting.

However, I really like the handwritten text and think this represents Tracy well, while also working with the other texts for the headings, so that the pages look pleasant and represent a book from this genre.