This is a blog post talking about the best fonts and font sizes to use in children's books. The post mentions that the letter forms are very important for beginner readers and to not use fonts with complex or non standard letter forms (stick to the letter forms children will be being taught in school). The size of the font is mentioned with a suggested range of 14-18pt but more importantly the writer says to not go smaller than 12pt and to make sure there is plenty of white space around the text to make the letter forms easy to identify. Other posts I have read pointed out that the books will often be being read by a parent rather than a child especially books aimed at younger children. This post says that clarity of text remains important as the book may often be being read in poor lighting (as a bed time story for example). Also important is that layout of the text, read out loud the text as you are adding it to your book, try to arrange the lines as you would when speaking and avoid hyphenating words as that may be beyond the child's reading level. The post also suggests using black text on a white background unless you have a good understanding of colour and composition. I agree with this and would further it to say that unless the text forms part of the composition it is best to separate the two as much as possible. adding a block of text can easily ruin a carefully considered composition so it is best in my opinion to split a double page spread to one page for text and the other for image.
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