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Top 10 Fonts for Book Covers and Interior Design |
PUBLISHED JULY 2017by Joel Friedlander, Book Designer, Blogger, and Writer Watch Joshua Robertson’s video recap of this article!![]() Joel Friedlander You’ve decided to create your own book covers and interiors design—do you know what font you plan to use? This should be one of the first, and most basic, questions you need to ask yourself before digging into other design elements. Whether you are designing your book’s cover or choosing the font for the body text of your book, I am going to show you five of my favorite fonts for cover and interior design. One of the most consistent and easily corrected mistakes I see with book covers that are designed by authors is weak or inappropriate typography. Given that a book cover usually has very few words on it, and those words (title, subtitle, author’s name) have a huge influence on buying decisions, this can be a major problem. For instance, if you’re writing about a topic aimed at a more masculine audience, does it help you to have an overly embellished or feminine typeface that’s barely readable on your book cover? No, I don’t think so. Or, for a historical romance, you wouldn’t want a modern, clean sans serif typeface like Helvetica for your cover. It would look out of place. When you are designing your book cover, it is very important to choose a readable font that aligns with the tone of your book. 5 Great Fonts for Your Book CoverTo get you started, I’ve collected five great fonts for book cover design. What’s even better, three of them are free, and you can download them at fontsquirrel.com—so start experimenting with these for your book cover.
The best way to see the effect these fonts will have on your book is by trying them out. Since most of them are free, there’s no reason not to try and see what you think. Just browsing through these fonts and imagining them on a book cover helps give you a sense of how the fonts you choose influence the look and tone of your book. 5 Best Interior Design FontsThere’s no bigger decision you make in designing a book than picking the body typeface. A book, by nature, is a long reading experience, and as book publishers, we want our books to be as easy to read as possible while still communicating the author’s intent. Style and fashion also play their part in many book designs, particularly in popular niches. The accumulated expectations of 500 years of book readers also come into play. Books are pretty conventional objects, after all. Some fonts really lend themselves to book design while others that may look good in a brochure or on a business card or billboard, make odd, unreadable books. Any idiosyncrasy in the type design will be magnified by the repetition of typesetting 75,000 or 100,000 words in thousands of lines on hundreds of pages. So the choice of your basic typeface looms large when you sit down to design your book. Here are five typefaces that have become favorites and will almost always look great in your books, too.
Although it would be easy to fill a book with samples of great text typefaces, it’s also true that many professional book designers could, if necessary, limit themselves to just these five fonts and continue to create great—and greatly varied—interior book designs, for years to come. Visual ExamplesJoel Friedlander is an award-winning book designer, blogger, and writer. He speaks regularly at industry events and is the author of A Self-Publisher’s Companion and co-author of The Self-Publisher’s Ultimate Resource Guide. The blogger behind TheBookDesigner, Joel is a columnist for Publishers Weekly, and was named by Writer’s Digest as one of the 10 people to follow in book publishing. |