Before a child can read a single word, they can read a picture. Long before language becomes a tool they can use with confidence, images are already doing extraordinary work \u2014 shaping how they understand the world, how they feel about what surrounds them, what they consider beautiful, what they learn to notice. A child’s first encounter with art is almost always through a book. And yet we rarely stop to think about what that means.
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We tend to speak about children’s books in terms of their stories, their values, their educational content. We ask whether the message is appropriate, whether the vocabulary is suitable, whether the themes are enriching. All of this matters. But the illustrations \u2014 the art that fills every page, that a child’s eyes travel across hundreds of times before they can even hold a pencil \u2014 this we treat as secondary. As decoration. As the wrapping around the real content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a profound misunderstanding of what illustration actually does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every illustrated children’s book is, whether we intend it or not, an art class. The colours an illustrator chooses, the lines they draw, the composition of each page, the way light and shadow are handled, the style \u2014 realistic, abstract, naive, geometric \u2014 all of this enters the child’s visual vocabulary long before they have words for any of it. A child who grows up with beautifully illustrated books develops an eye. They learn, without being taught, to notice composition, to feel the emotional weight of colour, to understand that images carry meaning. They grow into adults who are visually literate \u2014 capable of engaging with art, design and the visual world around them with confidence and sensitivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A child who grows up with poor, rushed or generic illustration learns something too. They learn that images don’t matter very much. That visual language is just filler. That beauty is not something worth pursuing carefully. These are lessons we would never dream of teaching explicitly \u2014 and yet we teach them implicitly every time we place a badly illustrated book in a child’s hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Long before a child understands narrative, they understand colour. Warm oranges and golds make them feel safe and held. Cold blues and greys create unease or melancholy. Bright, saturated tones bring joy and energy. Muted, earthy palettes suggest depth, intimacy, the ancient world. A great illustrator uses colour the way a composer uses music \u2014 to guide the reader’s emotional experience through the story, to say things that words cannot say, to create atmosphere that the text alone could never achieve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a Moroccan context, this dimension is particularly rich. The visual culture of Morocco \u2014 its zellige, its textiles, its architecture, its landscapes, the extraordinary quality of its light \u2014 offers illustrators a palette and a visual language of breathtaking depth and beauty. A children’s book that draws on this visual heritage does not just tell a story. It initiates a child into their own aesthetic tradition. It says: this beauty belongs to you. It has always belonged to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a common misconception that in a children’s book, the author creates the story and the illustrator decorates it. In reality, the relationship is far more complex and far more equal. A great illustrator does not follow the text \u2014 they respond to it, interpret it, and sometimes subvert it in ways that add entirely new layers of meaning. They make choices the author never specified: what does the main character look like? What time of day is it? What is happening in the background that the text doesn’t mention? What does the character’s expression reveal about feelings the words have left unsaid?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These are not decorative decisions. They are narrative ones. They shape the child’s experience of the story as profoundly as the words themselves. The child who reads a picture book is not just reading the author’s story. They are reading the illustrator’s interpretation of that story. They are holding two creative visions in their hands simultaneously, and the space between those two visions is where the magic lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If we accept that a child’s visual education begins with books, then we must accept the responsibility that comes with that. The art we place in children’s books is not incidental. It is formative. It will shape how a generation of children sees colour, composition, beauty and the visual world. It will tell them, implicitly but powerfully, what their own culture looks like when it is rendered with care and artistry. Or it will tell them that their culture has no visual language worth celebrating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At Agafay Books, illustration is never an afterthought. We choose our illustrators with the same rigour and the same care with which we choose our authors \u2014 because we believe that the art a Moroccan child grows up with matters profoundly. We want every page of every book we publish to be something a child could look at for a long time. Something that rewards attention. Something that is, in the fullest sense of the word, beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because beauty is not a luxury. For a child, it is a necessity. And it is one of the greatest gifts a book can give.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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