There are always going to be complaints. But I can do everything I want to do with anchored graphics right now. With one major exception: It’s hard to predict what will happen with a graphic crossing a page break. If it’s floating, it may just not render. I can understand that. I really don’t have any idea how to handle that. But I can simply change my graphic so it doesn’t float and the page break will … Continue reading →
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 →
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 →
This is the first portion of the new Practical Professional Self Publishing Handbook due out before summer this year. InDesign is the true replacement for FreeHand Many designers are still upset that Adobe took FreeHand off the market. We remain convinced that FreeHand was a far superior vector drawing program to Illustrator. Actually, I bring good news. InDesign is actually more closely related to FreeHand than it is to Illustrator. Ole Kvern and I have commented on this many … Continue reading →
Use bulleted lists The typographic use of bullets and dingbats is conceptually unknown to typists. Lists are at the core of non-fiction and blog typography. Bulleted lists are an extremely effective means of attracting the reader’s attention—as are numbered lists. In fact, there has been a lot of study to find out what readers see and respond to. There are specific paragraph types you can use effectively to attract the reader’s eye or to re-attract it if it is … Continue reading →
Font families Over the years, font design has developed groups of fonts that are obviously variants of the same basic font. They are called font families. These families can have differences in weight and width. Commonly, they have also have italic variants; but that is really a special case, as we will see in a bit. Font weight Weight is the thickness of the stroke. Here are the common weights arranged in order from thin to thick: … Continue reading →
This is the new book on Fontographer 5.1. It’s has been great fun to go back to my roots, as it were and relearn the program that started me in font design. Fontographer is the app that started graphic design on the computer. It preceded Illustrator by over a year. It was the core that was developed into FreeHand. This is digital drawing that is fun again! As I got back into the application something remarkable happened. … Continue reading →
Things have really changed—free whitepaper. Above is a link to a free PDF about how to publish your book for free in print, downloadable PDF, ePUB on iBooks and NookBooks, Kindle book, and various ebook formats. Included are marketing materials and intensive marketing—all for free. This is the new paradigm of on-demand publishing What has happened with few people noticing is that books have become a creative effort for fine artists and authors of all types. Not … Continue reading →
I ran across this in my Christian professionals group at Linked In this morning. It is a visually exciting presentation to be sure. My only question is: Can it really be used? I saw no place to add notes, new crossreferences or any of the other things necessary for a real study bible. I’ve included a scan of one of the pages in one of my bibles to show you what I mean. It may be that … Continue reading →
When people ask, “why Radiqx?” I give them the usual shtick about it means radical, back to the roots, basic Kingdom membership, serving the King. I don’t usually mention I chose the name because I’m crazy with a weird sense of humor. But that’s more accurate than I’m comfortable admitting. I had one of those brain f***s again today. Why anyone would want a shirt like this, I don’t know. But then I would wear it, so … Continue reading →