Picturebook Templates and Users' Guide

The 100 First Children’s Books guideline offers recommendations for “first collection” of children’s literature. It is intended for Read@Home and other early reading programs involved in the development and/or selection of books to support children’s pre-reading and early reading skills.

To support the development of the books suggested in the guideline, Read@Home has also created a series of InDesign templates for designers. Each template contains two parts:
• An InDesign Master Template in the proper trim size, with pre-created parent pages for ease of use.
• A PDF Users’ Guide to aid designers working with the templates.

Picturebook Template
• This template is fairly large, in order to give space for interesting images and engaging design.
• This template can be used for fiction or nonfiction.
• It is available in both portrait and landscape trims.

Important Notes
The trim sizes for these templates were selected by Blue Tree Group.
• They are based on cost-effectiveness for offset print runs of 10k+, on coated paper for the brightest color
reproduction.
• Print runs between 2500 and 10k are generally printed in a sheet machine with no cut-off feed, thus trim size
also plays a minor role in cost.
• Print runs under 2500 are generally most affordable when printed digitally on-demand, thus trim size is a less critical cost factor.

Suggestions about procurement, cover and paper weight, and other helpful topics are available here.