woof meow tweet-tweet

woof

meow

tweet - tweet

by Cecile Boyer

This book kept my son giggling from start to finish

and I think he would have reacted the same way

at age four as he did at age twelve.

Boyer begins “Do you know how to tell the

difference between a dog, a cat and a bird?”

and uses design and font styles to describe

the individual habits of each animal,
and the clash when the

three animals encounter each other.

The humor is that each is always illustrated with

its animal noise word (as shown in the title). 
The dog is a brown “woof,” 
the cat a black “meow,”

and the bird a blue “tweet-tweet.”

Amusingly, Cecile Boyer wrote this first in French

so the original title was Ouaf Miaou Cui-Cui.

The francophone ontomotapoeia is a fun fact 
to share with an older reader,

another is that woof is set in Futura, 
meow in a font designed by Emmanuel Pevny for the book,

and tweet-tweet in Elementa - the
personality and effect of typeface is a 
sophisticated discussion made easy by
the amusing examples in the book
(the rest of the text is in Neutraface named after Richard Neutra. I find the name Neutraface irresistibly comic).

Kids love making animal noises and this is a great

book for a read along.
I keep the typeface of my reviews simple, but
I'm sure you've noted I enjoy adding a spectrum
of hues to them, as in
-Spectrum Mom