Joel rarely writes for his blog any more, but it is a treat when he does. Today’s article is an excellent example of why his blog is so good: clean, concise, and useful. We can boil down the advice to the following: Fiction authors are unknown Fiction is marketed to a much wider audience who is initially unknown by the author. The new author needs to work very hard on becoming known. Giving away books is essential as … Continue reading →
Yea, I know, here goes David off on another of his “professional quality” rants again…. But this one’s important! Lists are #3 in reading importance The studies I’ve seen [and please prove me wrong if you know better] show that, after picture captions and headlines, lists are third in reader importance. Many readers look for lists as they start skimming when they get bored. They assume that a list will give them a synopsis and let them … Continue reading →
Please click here to contact us with any questions Troubleshooting Your Fonts Webinar Dear David, Happy New Year and welcome back to the Fontlab webinar series! To start off the new year (Tuesday, 21 January at 11:00CST) David Bergsland will talk to us about troubleshooting the font design process. For many, if not most, new font designers dealing with the sheer quantity of characters and glyphs is daunting. What is needed is a procedure to get your … Continue reading →
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 →
I posted last week about the dangers of allowing your ebook to degenerate into a Website. After all, “An ebook is just encapsulated HTML & CSS.” It was basically a plea to design your ebooks in InDesign. I missed making my core point. I wasn’t saying that code geeks cannot design ebooks. I was saying that most coders are not designers, but technicians. One of my commenters (Tom) suggested that writers are just as bad as coding … Continue reading →
Why do you want to use Fontographer? For the fun of it! When I received the opportunity to go back to my roots, and see what the new Fontographer was like, I was a little concerned. I had just spent nine years painfully teaching myself to letterspace by hand, to write OpenType features, and to become accustomed to the tool set of FontLab. Don’t get me wrong, FontLab is a great program and I am … Continue reading →
This is a special limited time offer until October 1, 2011 It is a low-priced, comb-bound 6×9 proofing release. I am selling the downloadable PDF for only $2.99 and the printed book for only $11.95. My hope is that you will read it and give me comments and feedback (and even typos) so I can make the full release for $9.99 and $19.95 in October. here’s the back cover copy: Why do you want to use Fontographer? … Continue reading →
This is the rough draft of a third portion of “The New Publisher” which will be a guide to ministers, ministries, and non-profits who need to get their vision out to their people. This new paradigm of the 21st century radically changes things. It gives us an opportunity we should not pass up. Formatting basics Designing your paragraphs We need to talk a bit about setting up your paragraphs. Again most of this knowledge is assumed by … Continue reading →
Some of you may have heard: David’s retired from teaching and is now focusing on font design. He already has an apprentice with more making plans to join the foundry. Obviously, it was time for some changes. The name comes from a huge hackberry tree on the boulevard outside the front door of the foundry. As they add workers Hackberry fonts will be offering fonts from a variety of people. Radiqx is looking forward to the future … Continue reading →