Week 1: How Should a Picture Book Behave?

A picture book should make itself easy to read. It guides your eye, tells you where to look first, and never leaves you unsure what happens next. Most of the time this works so well that you never notice it happening — which is exactly the problem this course is built around.

Before you can break a rule on purpose, you need to know it is there. This lecture introduces the conventions readers rely on without thinking about them:

• gaze and reading order — where your eye goes first on a page or spread;
• left page versus right page — the different jobs the two halves of a spread usually do;
• words and pictures — the assumption that text and image agree with each other;
• page boundaries — what a single page frames in and frames out;
• page turns — the pause between spreads, and what a book promises will change underneath it;
• the narrator — whose voice is telling you what is happening;
• reader expectations — what a reader assumes will happen next, based on every other picture book they have read before this one.

Today’s studio work, Rule Hunt, asks you to find five of these in one real book and then break one of them on a single rough spread. The rest of the course spends twelve weeks working through what happens when each of these conventions is interrupted — one at a time, and later, in combination.