Windows and Words: A Look at Canadian Children's Literature in English

Publishing Children's Picture Books: The Role of Design and Art Direction

Publishing Children's Picture Books: The Role of Design and Art Direction MICHAEL SOLOMON l\ FREQUENTLY ENCOUNTERED RECURRING THEME in the self-perception of graphic designers seems to be that encapsulated in Rodney Dangerfield's famous formula. A recent column by Roy Behrens, a professor of art and teacher of design history, asks why it is that architects, playwrights, composers, actors, choreographers, even fashion designers are known to a general audience outside their fields, and are even widely celebrated , but graphic designers rarely are so recognized. Behrens's article makes a good attempt at answering this question, for his theme is the "transparency" which has always been held as the rigorous and chastening ideal of the typographer's art. We don't get no respect because at our best we do work that lives up to this ideal of transparency—the page design is to be a neutral, unobtrusive medium for the transmission of the author's thought. Nor are we, like an author, the primary producers of a work of art but rather the servant of the writer, illustrator, photographer, and, most important, the reader. The temptation designers feel to struggle against the constraints of transparency are indeed great. That way perhaps lies glory. And a great deal of the typography of the last twenty years has been characterized by a radical self-assertion, seemingly motivated expressly in reaction to transparency and sensitivity. Art, of course, may advance by means of such reactions. Conversely typography's tradition may stand as a constant rule and critique against what we may call "opacity" and design 192 self-expression. This is a real critique based in a living tradition. Typography 's conservatism is essential and organic. When we bring adverse judgement against an exemplar of the anti-transparent tendency we may use as our standard examples that are tried and true in an era now over five hundred years long. The history of typography is the history of fashions and innovations as well, but its conservative tradition is embodied in the type designs and techniques that have not fallen into disuse or curiosity or quaintness, but have managed to stay the course and weather trends and pressures even to the practice of today. It was apt and sharply descriptive of typographic practice that D. B. Updike subtitled his classic history of printing types "A Study of Survivals." So the tradition, being a vital one, permits us to enjoy and work creatively within its limits. As I take my place beside Janet Lunn and Marie-Louise Gay, two of the great "primary producers"—to use a term for, I promise, the last time—I am reminded of how great is the reward of servitude to the reading public, of allowing the art of design silently to bring, a rich, literary, and illustrative art to life through the book.] If the Dangerfield syndrome is thus rendered less painful, there remains another theme that haunts the designer's biography that was brought back to me anew, when I read, I think in Adobe magazine in a brief throwaway line by a designer now approaching a well-established phase of her career, of her sudden realization that it no longer concerned her to make the Herculean effort of explaining to her parents what it was exactly that she did for a living. She is referring—it came to me with some force— to a very real fact of life. I remember the looks I too would attract when I attempted an apologia of my nine-to-five (in those days more like nine-to-nine) job; in some few cases the eyes of the hearer would glaze over—this was clearly diagnostic and I would gratefully shut up. But more often the looks were of incredulity or suspicion that seemed to accuse me of pulling off some sort of rare scam. "Let me get this straight," would begin the comfortable listener possessed of a real job. "You don't make the pictures, you don't set the type, you don't edit texts, you don't print the books, you certainly don't write them—so what exactly is it . . .?" Then there was the danger to merely polite inquirers of being frightened off by my attempt at an answer. I remember once being asked by an uncle of mine the same heavy question, and I, being of course in my first innocent design youth, began the disquisition which always held so much charm for [18.118...