COP - Theory Into Practice - Decisions

Size
Like specified in a previous post, a fairy tale book would need to fit into a childs hand, and so for that it needs to be fairly small. I have decided that A6 is the most appropriate size to use, as it's not small enough to make the layout cramped, but not big enough to leave loads of gaps due to not having much text.

Stock
Whilst I'm not sure exactly what stock I want to use, I know what requirements I'm looking for. I want to be white or very slightly off-white as I feel like the overall feel of the book should be positive and I think the cleaner the stock is, the more this will come through. I don't want my stock to be massively textured as I don't want the quality of the images to be compromised when printing due to the importance of images in fairy tale books. It also needs to be thick enough to be fairly strong but not too thick to the point where it won't fold very easily or will creep when it comes to binding.

Binding
Due to the elegant and dainty nature of what I want to produce, I think using thread to saddle-stitch bind the book would be most appropriate. If I use a pastel colour thread to do so this will add a feminine feel to the book which would reflect the nature of fairy tales.

Fonts
Initially I thought that it would be most appropriate to use a script font to get the feel of elegance, but I found that on a small scale script fonts tend to be quite illegible. I looked at some spreads from existing childrens books to see how they approached typographic decisions, and found a varied range of font styles used, as shown below.

I found that I liked the quirkiness and relaxed feel of the hand-written style of typeface in the bottom image, but I think that because my book will have an underlying message to it, I need something a little more regular and standard.

I also thought that the use of roman serif typefaces somewhat clashes with the idea of youth, and so this is something I wish to avoid.

Taking these factors into account, the font I will use is Futura, as it's sans serif, and the fact that the cap height is different to the ascender height and is quite a narrow typeface might give it the quirky and child-like feel I'm looking for whilst still being standard enough to not seem too immature.

Images
After looking at examples of childrens books to help inform my font choice, I found a style of illustration that will be really appropriate for me to use.

This style of illustration is really appropriate because it has a slightly messy feel to it which gives the impression that children could've done it. This also reflects some styles of fine art.