Children's book interior page — a girl sings on a balcony while her younger sister listens

About the Service

The Art Makes Room for the Story

Peacock Design Solutions designs the inside of children's books — the part a child actually spends time with. We illustrate and lay out picture books, early readers, chapter books, activity books and school readers for publishers, educational imprints and self-publishing authors.

Look closely at the pages below and you'll notice something they all share: a large, deliberately quiet area where nothing is happening. That is not empty space. That is where the text goes, and it was planned before a single line was drawn. When the illustration is composed around the words rather than the words squeezed onto a finished picture, the page reads cleanly at any size and the typesetter never has to fight the art.

We handle the unglamorous part properly too: margins that survive binding, gutter allowances that keep a character's face out of the spine, type sized for the reading age, and files that pass your printer's preflight the first time.

Page art with reserved text space
32-page picture book layout
Spread planning & pacing
Age-appropriate typesetting

Animal fables & moral stories
Indian family & school settings
Bedtime, festive & nature themes
Print-ready & ebook files

Pages From Our Portfolio

Turn on Show text area to see the space each illustration leaves for the story.

A girl sings on a balcony while her younger sister watches, beside a potted rose

A boy shows a toy snake to his grandmother seated in a wooden chair

A teacher praises a student at the blackboard while classmates look on

A lion holds a rabbit while a peacock and another rabbit watch from behind a bush

A burglar creeps through a door past a wide-eyed cat while the guard dog sleeps outside

Cockatoos and eagles dressed as a family argue in a living room

Three frogs sit in the grass as a kangaroo carrying a joey bounds past

A bear climbs a tree towards a beehive while a boy watches from the bushes below

Father Christmas rides a reindeer sleigh past a polar bear, rabbit and fox in the snow

A girl greets a smiling sunflower in a meadow filled with butterflies

A rabbit runs with a red ribbon as forest animals cheer from the bushes

A girl sits in a mango tree at night talking to a winged fairy under a full moon

A grandmother tells a story to her granddaughter, with the tale shown in an inset panel above

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What We Do

Services We Offer

Interior design for every kind of book a child will read.

Page Art With Text Space

Illustration composed around a reserved text area, so the words sit in clean space instead of being dropped on top of busy artwork.

Picture Book Layout

Full 32-page signatures planned spread by spread, with illustration placement, text positioning and page-turn pacing settled before typesetting begins.

Storyboard & Spread Planning

A thumbnail storyboard of the whole book before layout starts, so you can see the rhythm of the reading experience and approve it early.

Age-Appropriate Typesetting

Type size, leading and line length matched to the reading level — open and generous for early readers, tighter as the age band rises.

Activity & Workbook Layout

Task panels, answer spaces, tracing guides and instruction type laid out so a child can work on the page without the design getting in the way.

Print & Ebook Preparation

Bleed, gutter and safety margins set to your printer's spec, plus reflowable EPUB or fixed-layout files when a digital edition is needed.

The Details

What Makes an Interior Work

Gutter Discipline

Nothing important crosses the spine. Faces, hands and key text stay clear of the gutter, with the allowance set to the actual binding method.

Page-Turn Pacing

Every spread ends with a reason to turn. We place the beats so the surprise lands after the page-turn, not before it.

Quiet Space for Type

Flat walls, open sky and plain ground are drawn in on purpose. Every page ships with somewhere the text can sit and still be read.

Reading-Level Fit

Words per line, sentence breaks and hyphenation rules set for the age band, so a new reader never loses their place mid-sentence.

Consistency Across the Book

One set of paragraph and object styles drives the whole file, so a late text change doesn't reflow page 14 into something different from page 15.

Preflight Before Handover

Colour space, image resolution, embedded fonts and bleed all checked against your printer's spec before the file leaves us.

Our Process

How We Work

Brief & Manuscript

You send the final text, the age band and your printer's spec sheet. We flag anything missing before we start.

Thumbnail Storyboard

The whole book mapped as small pages, with the text area marked on each one, so pacing and page breaks are agreed early.

Sample Pages

Two or three finished pages set the art style and typographic grammar for the book. Once you sign these off, the rest follows.

Full Artwork & Layout

The complete interior illustrated and typeset, with a reader's proof PDF for your proofreader and two structured revision rounds built in.

Press Files

Preflighted print PDF, ebook files if required, and the packaged source document with all fonts and links.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Still have questions? We're a message away.

Because the text goes there. Each page is illustrated around a reserved area sized for the actual word count of that page. It looks empty in a portfolio and looks right in the finished book — turn on the text-area toggle above to see the shape of it.

Yes, that's a common brief. Send the artwork at print resolution with the text and we'll plan the pages and set the whole interior around it. If any image is too low-resolution for the trim size, or leaves no room for its text, we tell you before layout rather than after.

Yes — every page in the viewer above was drawn by our team. Doing the art and the layout together usually works out better, because the composition and the text placement are decided at the same time instead of one being fitted to the other.

Printers work in signatures — sheets folded into groups of 8 or 16 pages — so 24, 32 and 48 are the economical counts. Once front matter is allowed for, a 32-page book gives about 14 usable spreads. We plan to that from the start so nothing has to be cut later.

Yes. Each platform has its own bleed, margin and colour requirements, and we build to whichever one you're using. If you're publishing to more than one, we supply a separate file set for each.

Yes, including bilingual layouts where two scripts share a page. Indic scripts need more vertical space than Latin at the same point size, so we size the text area for that rather than squeezing them in afterwards.

A 32-page picture book interior typically takes two to three weeks from approved sample pages, including both revision rounds. Chapter books and activity books are scoped individually, with the schedule agreed before we start.

Yes — the packaged InDesign document with fonts and linked images, plus the layered artwork, on final payment. A reprint with a small text correction shouldn't mean commissioning the layout again.

Children's Book Interior Page Design