Going into these things, you never think about the potential job hazards of doing book design. For instance, after awhile, the words “Dear Michael” stop making actual sense, and start just being loops and whorls and lines.
Especially when you’re scanning them in 500 different handwriting fonts.
I’m presently finishing up the book design for Broken, and I just have a few things left to select, format, and polish before we get down to the technical nitty-gritty of generating the files.
I know just how Val Altrera writes. But it’s not legible enough for use in a book, especially in the first text we encounter. So I’m searching for a font that combines legibility and a sense of “scriptiness” and still gives the flavour I see in my head for Val’s handwriting. It’s slow going, and the word “dear” now looks really, really funny.
Also, it’s strange. The hardest part of designing Broken is getting the bloody printer’s ornaments right. It’s harder than you’d think to find unobtrusive, appropriate printer’s ornaments for a near-future dystopia.
It’s a good thing I really like DaFont and hunting for the perfect font and style…
FontSquirrel (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/) is amazing and well curated, and Smashing Magazine does great posts about high-quality free fonts (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/tag/typography/), if you haven’t checked those out yet! <3 typefaces…
I’ve got some truly smashing fonts for general setting, but finding the specialty fonts for covers and printer’s ornaments and odd quirks of the text, like a handwritten letter, always takes forever.
To FontSquirrel!