Where to Put the Text in a Picture Book Spread

You can illustrate a picture book beautifully and still make it hard to read. Diana McDerMott, who teaches From Manuscript to Printed Book on Twotap, says she has seen plenty of gorgeously illustrated books undone by one thing: nobody planned where the words would go. Dark text on a dark background, words dropped over busy texture, or a block of story a reader sails straight past without noticing it was there.

Text and image are partners, not competitors

That is her framing, and it changes the order of operations. Both the words and the picture need space to breathe, which means the space for text is part of the composition rather than something you find afterwards in whatever gap is left.

The four places text can live

Knowing all four means you always have an option, even on a difficult spread.

• At the top. Above the illustration, typically in clear sky, on a pale background, or in a dedicated band of color or white space.
• At the bottom. Below the illustration, sitting on ground, water, a floor, or a clear lower band. She notes this is a very common position in picture books.
• Integrated into the scene. Floating within the illustration, but still on something clear: a plain wall, a path, a page, any area deliberately kept simple and light. This works beautifully when the text is short and the area behind it stays quiet.
• On a separate panel. One page carries the illustration, the facing page is primarily text, either text only or text with a small spot illustration.

The one absolute rule

Everything else is preference. This is not.

"Your text must be readable. It's not if you squint, not if you zoom. It needs to be readable from the distance of a child sitting in a lap."
Diana McDerMott, in the lesson Text Placement in Your Spreads

That is a usefully concrete standard, because it is the actual viewing condition of the book. Not your screen at 200 percent.

What it demands is contrast: dark text on a light background or white text on a dark one, with enough separation to carry at that distance. And when the background genuinely has to be detailed, her fix is to place a semi-transparent block of color behind the text so the words stay legible without flattening the art.

Mark the text before you paint anything

You do not need the real manuscript text this early. In the storyboard she marks each text area as a rectangle or a set of horizontal lines, sitting where the words will go. That is enough to guarantee the composition was designed around the text rather than beside it.

Then she audits: go back through every spread and confirm each one has a marked home for its words.

The audit, and the three fixes

For each spread, two questions. Is there enough contrast where the text will sit for it to be legible? Is the background behind it simple enough?

A spread with no obvious place for text is a red flag, and she treats it as a design problem with three straightforward solutions:

• Clear an area of the composition to hold the text.
• Split the spread, so one page carries the illustration and the other carries the words.
• Simplify the background behind the intended text area.

All three are cheap while the spread is still a thumbnail. None of them are cheap once it is painted, which is the entire argument for doing this at the storyboard stage.

A checklist for every spread

• Pick one of the four positions deliberately, and vary them across the book
• Mark the text area as a rectangle or lines before rendering
• Check contrast at reading distance, not at zoom
• Add a semi-transparent block if the background must stay busy
• Treat a spread with nowhere for text as a spread that needs redesigning

Text placement sits inside the storyboarding stage of Diana McDerMott's From Manuscript to Printed Book on Twotap, which carries a manuscript through pagination, character design, storyboards, color, rendering and print-ready files.