Tag Archives: Typography

Keeping your mind open to creative typographic solutions

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One of the main troubles we have in setting books for readability is the set of largely subconscious rules we’ve learned over the years. In an entertaining and useful article today by Jonathan Hoefler named: How to Use Clashing Fonts He gives us several examples showing why it is necessary to break common “rules” in the interest of both style and readability. In the example he gives above, he shows the use of two virtually identical Dutch Old … Continue reading →

Book typography: The reality of picking fonts

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The basic parts of type Again, we need some more basic language definitions. You can see above how the point size of the type relates to the ascender, cap height, x-height, baseline, and descender. More importantly, you get a glimpse of things that are important in the world of typography. This illustration is from my font design book, Practical Font Design With FontLab 5, which is available in print as well as ebooks at iBookstore, NookBooks, Kobo, Scribd, and … Continue reading →

Book Publishing With InDesign CC: Spiral-bound

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Even after over forty-five years, there’s still that little thrill when you see a finished book for the first time. It’s too bad that Amazon won’t carry them. But, they are the best choice for the classroom or self-study. The spiral-bound workbook I had to cut out the Christian marketing section to get the page count below the 470 page maximum for spiral-bound. The only thing I really miss are the color graphics. To get that (and … Continue reading →

A free sample of “Book Publishing With InDesign CC” is available

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I’ve published a sample of the new book on the Adobe servers. It’s about 75 pages of the various sections of the book. If you are interested in a review copy I recommend the PDF is reader’s spreads with the full color graphics. Let me know if you are interested. Here’s a link to the page with more information and purchase links. If word processor book production is taking up too much time and the results are … Continue reading →

Page Layout Part Six: Designing body copy styles

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Body copy styles The first formatting decisions I will be talking about are for the body copy. This is what Word calls Normal. Many of the Word docs you get to setup will be entirely locally formatted Normal. It is the main content of your book, and it must be comfortable to read. This paragraph style is what produces that smooth type color you need for the background against which the contrasting heads and subheads stand out. … Continue reading →

Basic page layout part four: Getting them to read it

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Before I get started with this, I need remind you about the goal: a beautiful book which is comfortable to read.  You need a customized set of styles to enable you to keep your book consistent and give you global control over the entire book as you format. Excellent typography is only possible if you understand how to design paragraphs. Styles make paragraph design possible. We will deal with them conceptually, but you should know this is … Continue reading →

Basic Page Layout: Part 2, Margins & Columns

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This is part two of the new series on page layout from my new book, Self-Publishing With InDesign CC. We continue with two of the most important controls for readability. To the left is an example of bad design. The body text is Berthold Baskerville Book 8/12, while the caption is Adobe Garamond Pro 6/7. So, no one can read it—too small. The columns are so narrow that there are only 7-9 words per line with the average closer … Continue reading →

Basic page layout: Part One, Book size

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As I get ready to release my new book, Self-Publishing With InDesign CC, I want to share some of the basic ideas in the book. Self-publishers rarely know page layout standards So, this little series will help with some of those basic decisions you need to make. Setting up your book to be read: One of the more daunting aspects of book design for the inexperienced is page layout. Most people have Word experience and as I have said … Continue reading →

Butterick’s Practical Typography, a new online book

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A new typography resource, beautifully done Graphics.com gave a link today to an online book, Butterick’s Practical Typography [shareware, to use an old term] which looks to have some excellent pieces. I just read the first article: Drowning the Crystal Goblet. It is quite good. In it, the concept of invisible typography is taken apart. As I have taught that for years, it was good for me to hear the counter arguments. The second article: Typography in … Continue reading →