Matthew Carter: one of the best font designers
My Fonts monthly interview this month is with Matthew Carter. He designed Verdana, Georgia, ITC Galliard, Skia, Snell Roundhand, and Alisal among many others. You should read it.
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A link to a typographic poster
This infographic shows a lot of what goes into a good font. More than that it enables you to talk about it. I do not agree with all of it. But it is very good. For example, for me aperture is about the openness of the c, s, and characters like that. The poster calls the opening of the u the aperture. We’re probably both right. It’s copyrighted or I’d put it in this posting and talk … Continue reading →
Choosing a companion sans for your body copy
Use a companion font for the heads & subheads This font family needs to be carefully chosen. It needs to have enough contrast to the body copy font to make the heads stand out. But it must have the same, or a very similar, x-height. This way you can use it comfortably for things like run-in heads, where the first few words in a paragraph are used as a contrasting low-level subhead. Your family choice should probably … Continue reading →
What we need in a font family for books
As typographers and book designers, we need a minimum three-font family—regular, italic, and bold: Italic is necessary for periodical names and emphasis. Bold is used for proper names and headers. As you saw at the start of this paragraph I used a bold through the colon to emphasize an important point. In my books I use my Bold Sans Serif. But regardless of which font family you choose it must satisfy several basic requirements of book design. … Continue reading →
The special characters you must use in your books
Today, in the digital arena, a font is simply a complete set of characters for a given style: In InDesign, for example, a font can be set as any size from a tenth of a point to 1296 points. Below I am showing you the font used for my books, named Contenu Book (which I designed), showing some of the 563 characters available in it. Notice the three styles of numbers (among other things). Contenu Book This … Continue reading →
Cover Design: The seduction of type effects
Amateur covers are obvious! The number one mistake is made by adding all kinds of fancy trimmings to your type. Not only does it make the type much harder to read, but all trained designers have been strongly told that NO ONE EVER does that. As a result, there are very few professional covers with type stylized like that. If it is, the type is carefully embossed, maybe beveled. Using the minimal amount necessary to get the … Continue reading →
New Release! “How Do I Make The Next Book Better?”
This is the plaintive question I get every time after I have set up, formatted, and uploaded a book for a new author. It is also one of the most common questions I see while socially networking. Buy $2.99: How Do I Make The Next Book Better? There are three basic underlying concepts 1: Producing a print version of your book 2: Dealing with the size of your production budget 3: Producing a manuscript which can be easily … Continue reading →
How can I make the next book better?
How can I make it better the next time? This is the plaintive question I get every time after I have set up, formatted, and uploaded a book for a new author. It is also one of the most common questions I see in the FaceBook and Linked-In groups, Google+ communities, and specialized author forums in which I spend time. It is coupled with the question, “How can I get the print version set up?” There are … Continue reading →
DPS in trouble: people do not like digital magazines
I’ve been saying this for a long time, but now stats are surfacing to show my point. Dead Tree Edition has a good article on it showing that only 25% of tablet users prefer digital magazines over print. That means three-quarters of tablet users prefer print. My point is that DPS is a dead-end for Adobe. It is one of those “you did a wonderful job of making something I really didn’t have any need for” type … Continue reading →
InDesign CC begins the solution to ugly HTML lists
One of the real issues with ePUBs and Kindle books are the horrendously ugly HTML lists which have no typographical relationship with the rest of the copy in the book. InDesign CC has made a large step forward by beginning their development of a robust convert-to-text option for our ePUBs. Let me show you the issues with a sample document: Here we see a small bulleted list using an oversized red dingbat from the font, Embellishments … Continue reading →