I was happy to attend a kid lit salon on the visual elements of reading at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. I always learn a tremendous amount of information from these gatherings. Karen Ginman, Youth Materials Selector for the New York Public Library, introduced Michael Arndt. He is a graphic designer and also the author of Cat Says Meow. He gave a Power Point presentation about linguistics: in terms of how people process information and how it relates to children's picture books. He previously gave this presentation at a library conference in Syracuse.

Letters and Characters in Language

The author pointed out many things of interest. For example, Braille letters look somewhat like letters of the Roman alphabet. "A" and "e" have the simplest representations because they occur often in our language. Also, surprisingly enough, Italian gestures carry specific meanings. He discovered this during the course of four years that he spent in Italy. Korean, Japanese and Chinese use the same characters (called Kanji), but they have different sounds to indicate the same symbols. We do this in English, too. For instance, some capital letters are quite different from their lower-case counterparts, and we use different font styles, sizes and type and background colors to evoke various meanings and emotions. The Japanese symbol for book is similar to the symbol for tree because books are made from paper.

How Do You Find Your Train?

The New York City subway system uses circles of different colors with numbers or letters inside to effectively group together similar train lines. Concrete poetry is when the words of a poem are arranged into an image. Initial caps (first letter capital, followed by lower-case letters) are more legible to read than all caps because we read the shapes of words more than the individual letters. All caps form identical rectangular blocks, whereas initial caps form different shapes. The word ampersand (&) comes from the Latin word for "and."

Genius of Advertising

Lastly, Arndt launched into a discussion of logos, which dovetails with much-talked about commercials that air during the Superbowl during this time of year. As a graphic designer, he creates logos. H & R Block has a simple green square next to the company's name. This is a logo that the company could pay $50,000 for. He is a fan of the Nike logo because it connotes aerodynamics, sports and competition. Nike is the Winged Goddess of Victory. 

Join us for the next amazing kid lit salon, and you may be able to pick up some free galleys, too!

Future Children's Literary Salon

Saturday, March 5 from 2–3 PM
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Meet the Founding Editors of the CBC Diversity Committee