THE RIGHT FONT FOR YOUR BOOK COVER
When creating a book cover for any author or publisher it will of course require a great deal of work and creativity from the design team, but ensuring the cover is designed using the correct choice of color and font (along with the main image itself) is something that often gets overlooked by the ‘DIY’er’.
There is the common premise within the design industry that whatever font you choose just make sure it isn’t ‘Papyrus’, it seems to be the favorite choice of the home-made cover (the ones you tend to find at the very bottom of Amazon’s book pages), as such it now has a bit of a bad reputation with those of us who create and design book covers professionally. Is it fair though? Well that depends upon what exactly you’re designing, some fonts will have their place and a great many of them will be very limited indeed.
But the font you choose for the front cover of your book will make a massive impact to the gravity or sensitivity you are trying to achieve, get it right and the book will look superb, get it wrong and any credibility will be lost in an instant. You’ll also find that a font which works well for one design looks awful on another, and then you have to take into account how it will be viewed when the book is made into an eBook cover and shrunk to the size of a postage stamp.
Most designers will have a group of their favorite fonts which they will tend to go to first when designing a cover, you will have a good idea as to which will work but you’ll make several drafts with at least a couple of variations. Once you know what font you’re going to use you still have to take into consideration the size and of course the color.
There is the common premise within the design industry that whatever font you choose just make sure it isn’t ‘Papyrus’, it seems to be the favorite choice of the home-made cover (the ones you tend to find at the very bottom of Amazon’s book pages), as such it now has a bit of a bad reputation with those of us who create and design book covers professionally. Is it fair though? Well that depends upon what exactly you’re designing, some fonts will have their place and a great many of them will be very limited indeed.
But the font you choose for the front cover of your book will make a massive impact to the gravity or sensitivity you are trying to achieve, get it right and the book will look superb, get it wrong and any credibility will be lost in an instant. You’ll also find that a font which works well for one design looks awful on another, and then you have to take into account how it will be viewed when the book is made into an eBook cover and shrunk to the size of a postage stamp.
Most designers will have a group of their favorite fonts which they will tend to go to first when designing a cover, you will have a good idea as to which will work but you’ll make several drafts with at least a couple of variations. Once you know what font you’re going to use you still have to take into consideration the size and of course the color.
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The size your title, subtitle and author name will not always just depend upon how much room there’s left, very far from it, the designer will have decided upon placement as an integral part of the design itself (just look at any book upon your shelf and imagine it without any type upon the cover).
In some cases the cover will be made up of font alone and the choice will set the tone for what the reader should expect from the title, for example, if the title was ‘The Home’ and was placed upon the front page in a font which was in the style of script then you may have an impression of a novel which could be a romance or a heart-warming story, now place it upon the page using a bolder distressed font and the meaning of the title changes completely.
Choosing the correct font will divide many but it cannot be stressed just how important it is and how much focus should be given to this element of the design, when taking in to account the cover for your eBook then the font will need to be of a size and composition that it can be read by the reader easily when browsing through the many books within the store. Not only is the size key but so is that of the color, you run the fine line of not clashing with the overall design but also being able to standout upon its background too.
So the next time you look at a book’s cover, consider its font, there has been a lot of time spent on it!
In some cases the cover will be made up of font alone and the choice will set the tone for what the reader should expect from the title, for example, if the title was ‘The Home’ and was placed upon the front page in a font which was in the style of script then you may have an impression of a novel which could be a romance or a heart-warming story, now place it upon the page using a bolder distressed font and the meaning of the title changes completely.
Choosing the correct font will divide many but it cannot be stressed just how important it is and how much focus should be given to this element of the design, when taking in to account the cover for your eBook then the font will need to be of a size and composition that it can be read by the reader easily when browsing through the many books within the store. Not only is the size key but so is that of the color, you run the fine line of not clashing with the overall design but also being able to standout upon its background too.
So the next time you look at a book’s cover, consider its font, there has been a lot of time spent on it!
