GETTING STARTED - ADDING THE TYPE FACE

I’ve Lisa Kirkham's delicate typeface, Nara, in both The Little White Sprite and Zoe’s Boat. The new book, We’re Going to Build a Dam -very much a boy book - needs something different.

In the story the boys are nameless –just ‘two boys.' The narrative is mainly in dialogue and the boys’ voices need to be differentiated. We thought of using different fonts, playing around with bold and italic and size of font. In the end we decided to use a just the one font, Compendio, in Roman. Compendio has a broken line and fits the way I’ve drawn the two scruffy boys using a scratchy black ink line.

The boy’s voices are differentiated by colour; the more dreamy and imaginative boy has an orangey red font and the other who is more practical and drives the dam building forward has a browny red font. At the moment the narrative is a blue font rather than black making the typeface merge with the palette of the pictures. That might change.