Blackall, Sophie. Hello Lighthouse. Little, Brown and Company, 2018.

Hello Lighthouse adopts the nature of its subject matter in its tall, narrow trim size. Rich double-page spreads bleed off the page. Often, the lighthouse is on the verso and the expanse of the ocean fills the recto. Blackall repeats this page design nearly a dozen times across the entirety of Hello Lighthouse. However, trim size isn’t the only way in which the lighthouse influences the interior design. Blackall embraces the circular nature of the lighthouse when portraying scenes that take place inside, often using circular frames to show slice-of-life moments. The frames become glimpses through the lighthouse’s portholes or they welcome readers to pace the circular rooms.

Even when the circle is not explicitly used as a frame in Hello Lighthouse, it still emerges as an important design element. In this spread, the lighthouse keeper and his wife have welcomed their newborn child. Blackall presents an intimate scene of the mother in bed, and her husband holding their baby with his ever-important logbook. The circle emerges behind this intimacy. The sea green wall meets the floor for just a sliver along the far edge of the recto, showing the gentle curve of the circular room. This arcing junction of floor and wall contribute to what Uri Shulevitz calls the “underlying geometry” of an illustration (181). Underlying geometry "can be found in the main visual elements, guiding the eye" (181). The illustration has a circular underlying geometry. While the reader’s eye may alight on the text first, the placement of the characters on the recto draws the readers eye clockwise around the room using the subtle curve seen as a guide.

Additionally, smaller circles emerge within the illustration. These circles reinforce the underlying circle of Blackall's design. The quilt features circles on its blocks. The lighthouse keeper's feet rest on a circular rug. The circular top of the kerosene lamp emits a halo of light in an imperfect circle over the round table upon which it rests. The dark black top of the ink pot is a perfect circle and circles emerge from the baby’s round head, the lighthouse keeper’s irises and pupils, and the flushed red circles on his wife’s cheeks. While the circle is not an explicit frame in this spread, the composition of this page depends on the circular underlying geometry and the circles spread throughout the illustration. The narrative of Hello Lighthouse comes in a full circle from the lighthouse keepers arrival to his family’s departure. Blackall uses the circle as a design element to match the nature of the narrative and the nature of the lighthouse.

(431 words)

Works Cited:

Shulevitz, Uri. "Picture Space and Composition." Writing with Pictures. Watson-Guptill Publications, 1985, pp 167-185.

Baker, Jeannie. Home. Greenwillow Books, 2004.

A double-paned wooden window frame with golden handles and a wide windowsill looks out onto a small city backyard in Jeannie Baker’s Home. The outdoors becomes the focus of the story and the definition of home expands from indoor space to encompass the world beyond the back fence. Baker’s window allows the two concepts of home to merge as it opens and closes depending on the weather. The frame piece that divides the two panes falls directly in the gutter, a design choice that prevents the more detailed parts of the illustrations from getting lost. This centering of the window, with the central portion of the frame in the gutter also creates an underlying geometry that prioritizes the scene outside the window over the wall space that surrounds the window.

Rather than leaving the negative space around the edges of the window frame blank, Baker uses the space surrounding the frame to place visual markers of time. A height chart on the verso places the child, Tracy, as a six-year-old in the chosen illustration. The teddy bear that appeared in a previous spread has moved and dressed, presumably by Tracy. Tracy’s artwork resting on the windowsill serves as another visual cue for the passage of time as it is marked “Tracy age 6.” This childhood artwork is joined by more childhood art, this time on the wall on the far side of the recto. A self-portrait has aged and faded from the previous spread where it was bright orange and newly drawn by then four-year-old Tracy.

Not only does Baker uses the space surrounding the frame to serve as visual markers of the passage of time in this wordless picturebook, but she also uses these markers to bridge the frame that separates the indoors and the outdoors. Tracy’s drawing features the intraiconic text: “To Mum I am going to fly over the houses.” The drawing itself is crayon and shows a skyline and a winged Tracy. Outside the open window the reader sees a skyline, and a winged Tracy in the backyard. The reader looks out the frame to see Tracy's imagination come to life, even as the girl remains on the ground. Baker embraces the spirit of a window as a frame to indicate that home is just as much the space outside as it is the space inside.

(390 words)

Jenkins, Steve. Actual Size. Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

“Just how big is a crocodile?” the flap copy on Steve Jenkins Actual Size asks. The gate fold in the book later answers that question: The saltwater crocodile has a length of 23 feet. The collaged crocodile bleeds onto the page starting on the vers0 and extends across the recto and the gatefold leaving just a scant three-quarters of an inch of blank space at the narrowest point between the edge of the page and the tip of the crocodile’s nose. A similarly thin margin is at the narrowest point between the top of the crocodile’s head and the top of the page. Jenkins’ book uses a large, nearly square, trim size of 10x12 to display creatures, or parts of creatures, at their actual sizes. When taking into account the gate fold, Jenkins has just under 30 inches of length to present a crocodile

Displaying just the head and snout of a crocodile aligns with the focus of length for an effective use of the gatefold. The chin and neck of the crocodile bleed of the left and bottom edges of the page with negative space on the top and right-hand sides of the page. The negative space also flows into the crocodile’s open mouth filling in the ominous gaps between the teeth. The multitudes of pointed teeth are matched by the limited text on the page. “The saltwater crocodile [emphasis in text], the world’s largest reptile, is a man-eater.” The sheer space taken up by the crocodile, depicted in crumpled paper collage uses page design to offer readers a large-as-life encounter. Other illustrations within Jenkins’ book focus on the large and the small of the natural world, combining size and scale in an effective manner. Without the large trim size and the even larger gatefold, the effect of the crocodile illustration would not be as astounding.

(307 words)