A SUMMER ACTIVITY - WE'RE GOING TO BUILD A DAM

We’re Going To Build a Dam is the latest Plaister Press picture book - a good summer holiday read when, hopefully, children are messing around on beaches.
We had a lot of fun with the typographic design of this book, bringing about an interplay of text, image and typeface that feeds into the overall narrative. There are places where the lettering is used graphically as here where it follows the movement of the stream.

 

 The illustrations are painted in watercolour with a strong ink line that is matched by the typeface, Compendio, with its rough, broken line. The font is not wholly black but a dark grey. A gradation of tones is used to enhance the text; here the paler tone of the word ‘sand’ suggesting a substance of a different texture to boulders and rocks.

Here the function of the lettering is to imply sound: CRACK.

 

And at the end, the lettering becomes very much part of the narrative action in the way it is angled and placed,

as here where the dam is breaking up. Good luck with your dam building!