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ABSTRACT
Descriptions of graphic language are relatively rare compared to descriptions of spoken language. This paper presents an analytical approach to studying the visual attributes and conventions in children's reading and information books. The approach comprises development of a checklist to record 'features' of visual organization, such as those relevant to typography and layout, illustration and the material qualities of the books, and consideration of the contextual factors that influence the ways that features have been organized or treated. The contextual factors particularly relevant to children's reading include educational policy, legibility and vision research and typeface development and availability.
The approach to analysis and description is illustrated with examples of children's reading and information books from the Typographic Design for Children database, which also demonstrates an application of the checklist approach.
THIS PAPER PRESENTS AN ANALYTICAL APPROACH
to studying the visual attributes and conventions in young children's reading and information books in order to understand why particular design and production decisions might have been made.
A recurring theme in information books for children has been the life and work of the honey bee, and examples from the 1890s to the 1980s show the different ways text and pictures have been used to tell this story. Each of the spreads illustrated in figures 1-4 contains a number of graphic components or 'features': text, pictures, headings, captions. These are treated differently through, for example, typeface, spacing, position on the page, use of color. The different treatment of such features reflects, among other things, the printing technology of the time, the way teachers may have used the books in the classroom, national educational policy and publishers' ambitions to sell books. Each of these examples typifies the visual characteristics of books produced around the time each was published. The bee pictures are just one example from a larger study that has looked at changes in visual organization in children's reading and information books from 186o until the present day. Part of this work has been the development of an approach to systematic description and analysis of the visual characteristics of these books. It takes forward the more general idea that in order to understand language use you need to analyze and describe its characteristics and work out why...