“Over the 2017 Christmas break I created four very different poster designs to see which direction other committee members felt like going after our previous vendor produced similar designs several years in a row. After a specific design was selected there was several weeks of sending various editions of that design back and forth between TRCA committee members to fine tune the design; making sure the books are a central focus and making sure all the relevant information was appropriately displayed. As a committee we decided that the snappy header of ‘4 Months: 10 Books: 1 Winner‘ was a concise choice for advertising the essence of the TRCA program. With the help of Emily Fahey, Coordinator of Literacy at the CCRSB head office in Truro, we received colour prints of our posters, bookmarks and voting slips, and we were able to customize the number of copies of each item so that we didn’t have to pay for more material than necessary.

Images were sourced from Google using the ‘labeled for noncommercial reuse with modification’ filter. I used open source free fonts and did the majority of the design in GIMP, an open source image editing software similar to Photoshop, though the fonts had to be loaded into PowerPoint first and turned into images before they could be used in GIMP. I had a lot of fun working on this project and, as I am in the process of teaching myself how to use GIMP, was able to significantly improve my capability with this software! Now that I’ve finished work on the promotional material I am excited to have the time to sit down and read the TRCA books, all of which seem fabulous :)”

The Library of Congress, the Children’s Book Council and Every Child a Reader today announced the appointment of Jacqueline Woodson, whose book Brown Girl Dreaming was a 2015 TRCA Top Ten title, as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. To read about the position and Woodson’s platform “READING = HOPE x CHANGE” please visit the Library of Congress site.

From the award-winning author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, which you may remember as a former TRCA nominee, comes a novel about relationships, sibling dynamics, and unrequited love.