I started my Tracy Beaker assignment by searching DaFont.com to find something suitable.
I wanted to find a childlike but still very legible font, to meet the ability of the 7-10 year old target market.
I also needed something fairly edgy and not typically 'girly', because Tracy Beaker is a fairly unique character.
I liked the samples of the fonts below, but after importing them into inDesign, I found that the readability wasn't strong enough. This could be a problem in general for the age group, and for dyslexic readers.
These fonts were too edgy, on the page they stood out as a little aggressive and didn't fit with the cute, rounded Nick Sharratt illustration
I liked these fonts, but I felt they were perhaps too 'perfect' and rounded to give the effect I wanted. They are very effective in sample form, but didn't work in practice.
These fonts were too child-like to be included, I didn't want to undermine the narrator or to signify to the audience that the book was for a younger audience.
This font was too cutesy to suit Tracey Beaker, but I quite liked the font style with the exception of the hearts.
I settled on the four fonts below. I decided on Smart Kid because I think the font style is readable but still connotes a younger writer. The runner-up was Pastel Crayon, and I swapped back and forth for a while. Dsnet Child would have been perfect, but it was too thin to be readable and there was no downloadable 'bold' option.
Page Design
I noticed that there was a lot of spacing mistakes in the text, I made sure to add continuity to the text and deleted all of the extra spaces. I also noticed that in some cases 'Tracy' was spelled incorrectly, along with a few other errors in formatting or grammar.
I edited the tracking quite heavily in some sections in order to make the text read as it should, but still maintain the aesthetic. Readability is very important in this age group, and I wanted to stress that with the page design.
I edited the baseline grid to 16pts in order to allow great readability for the 7-10 age bracket. I chose the 14pt text size to fill the page. I also created a margin of 20pt.
For the master pages, I added page numbers and headers of the chapter title and the book title. I also overrode the master settings on the chapter header pages.
I then created paragraph styles for the main body, the questions that were already set out in the book, the headings and the chapter heading and title. This helped along the process because I didn't have to edit the settings on each piece of text numerous times.
The placing of the images came quite naturally because they were ordered. However, editing the text around the images so that they looked in place and also filled a majority of the white space took some time to perfect. I played around with different alignments on different pages, and treated each page individually to create an interesting and unique design style for each page.
Before placing any of the images in the file, I had to change the image mode of each one to CMYK, and I changed the quality to 300 dpi. This was a time-consuming process, but it saved me time in the packaging stage.
Conclusion
I think the Tracy Beaker assignment went quite smoothly, although it was a long process, it was enjoyable to design each page with thought and care.
I found the master pages to be my biggest obstacle, and I had to re-learn about them in order to create my finished product.
Upon printing, I was especially pleased with what I had accomplished with the typesetting, and I feel that it read especially well in person.
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