CREATION OF TYPOGRAPHIC FONT FOR CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

NARRATIVE REVIEW AND EXPERIENCE REPORT

Abstract

This article aimed to report the successful experience of creating a typographic font for children's literature, provisionally named “Mãe como faz”, in reference to a children's collection where it was used. To achieve this, as the most current references deal with digital fonts, which still follow the historically constructed knowledge of printing fonts, first and foremost, we carried out a narrative review, which, on the one hand, could update the subject, and on the other hand, it served as the basis for the creative process of the type in question. This work was justified by the intention of developing a typographic family for easy reading, both for young people and for children, as an action of the “Literando” research and extension project of the Instituto Federal do Paraná, Umuarama Campus, which has been in progress since 2014. Some designs were sketched by hand and then finalized using computer graphics, while others were created directly in computer graphics. We modeled the typographic characters in vector-based computer drawings and then we transformed into a digital typographic font, with the aid of the CorelDraw!ⓒ application. The creation of the types was initiated in 2015 and completed in 2017, while they were tested in works still under development. The work resulted in a functional true type font file that can be used in the major operating systems and also by the graphics industry. The font has been informally evaluated by teachers and students, as well as young readers, in the nine volumes of the “Mãe, como faz?” collection and in the book “As Aventuras de Téo e Sofia”, which were distributed to schools and libraries in the state of Paraná (Brazil) and are available for free download as e-books.