I have been looking at a selection of children's books for ideas on typography. This book Tickle Tickle by Dakari Hru, has hand rendered text on the cover and inside which harmonizes with the line work of the illustrations by Ken Wilson-Max.
This book from the Stinky Face series by Lisa McCourt has a combination of normal text and hand rendered text that interacts with the illustrations. Below is an example of this.
Oliver Jeffers, How to Catch a Star, also has a very hand rendered text which works well with his simple, but very clever illustrations.
Jan Omerod's Doing the Animal Bop also has lovely typography that works beautifully with the rhythm of the text; increasing and decreasing, bold and normal and is also at different angles depending on the scene.
When they write the word 'WADDLE,' (see right) it actually looks like it is waddling.
In Panda Big and Panda Small Jane Cabrera uses standard fonts but they increase and decrease to emphasise the opposite words that they are highlighting.
I will be using Adobe Illustrator to add the text to my pages. After trying out a few different fonts I decided on Apple Casual:
This sort of font is very similar to a child's first letters and so is familiar to the reader.
The typography of the cover title is hand rendered in the style of narrow boat art but the book blurb on the reverse side is done in Apple Casual to match in with the font inside the book.