This is just a quick note about some free font design resources which provide good typographic knowledge. I’m mentioning this because a large portion of my readers don’t come out of a professional graphic design or typographic background. These things are often not known by authors whose background is mostly found in Office and free design apps.

The longer you work in page layout, the more important fonts and font design become for many if not most people. The reasons for this are multiple.

• They’re an important part of your design style
• Your readers have grown up in a world of marketing where font choices matter
• Font designs are used to trigger reactions in readers
• Page layout has many assumptions which you violate at your peril

“Typography is an assumed baseline skill of any graphic designer in the late 20th century [ED: and still is up to this day]. But it is virtually unknown outside the world of publishing. Much of this knowledge has been attacked and eroded by our modern video-centered world. Many modern graphic designers can barely read—if you can imagine that. This is a larger problem than you might think because much of our typographic knowledge, as individuals, comes from all the excellent typography we have been reading since we learned to read.” From Basic Book Typography a book by David Bergsland 2011

Free font design resources from Monotype

This is the page which lists postings and articles from fy{T}I, Fontology, and fonts.com blog. fy{T}i is a newsletter which comes from MyFonts on an occasional basis. But it has good information. The one which arrived today is about different versions of the same font. Linotype.com has an online magazine.  These resources are part of what’s offered by the Monotype family of online font resources. They are a massive corporate effort of designing, producing, marketing, and selling fonts. This is a professional’s resource, and you need to keep an eye on it. As you learn page layout and typography, these resources will help. Remember, many of the choices you make are governed by normal reader expectations.

The fonts are an essential choice of professional designers

Full disclosure: I need to mention that I do sell my fonts on several of Monotype’s Websites. MyFonts.com, fonts.com, Linotype.com, and probably more. There are many of the larger font sales sites which have been brought under Monotype umbrella. MyFonts, especially, sells most of the font foundries in the world today including big ones like Adobe [only 346 of their families—all 1846 families are available as part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription for their apps: InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and 17 more] down to tiny ones like Hackberry Fonts [all 65 families of my efforts].

All of your design efforts will be colored by your font choices.

The free fonts are instantly recognizable to pros and many non-pros. This is not a bad thing, but you will find people who react to that negatively, but often subconsciously. Sadly, this is one of the issues faced by most Christian authors. For some reason, using professional tools is often considered simply outside the budget. (Yes, I’m guilty of it also.) Or, a general poverty mentality will not allow the better choices to even be considered. For Kindle books, which will probably be forced into using Bookerly by Amazon regardless, you may have no choice.

But for print books, it matters a lot. It’s one of the reasons, I formerly wasted a lot of effort on trying to show authors that using Word for layout compromises your efforts from the start. I’ve discovered that this battle is largely a waste of time on my part. But, believe me, readers outside the insular community of self-published authors notice the general low level of production subconsciously, at the very least.