Using type ornaments in your book design can add a pleasing pictorial element to your typographic pages. Depending on the tone you’re trying to establish with your design, there’s likely to be a choice of ornaments that will complement the other choices you’ve made when selecting fonts and the overall design direction for the book. […]
typography
Project Focus: Long and Complex Books Demand Attention to Detail
Two recent projects have reminded me of just how much attention book designers have to pay to details. With a complex book, every detail counts. What makes a book “complex”? It could be very long manuscripts, books with footnotes, endnotes, annotations, massive amounts of front matter and back matter, separate text streams, lots of tabular […]
Learn About the Color of Type Pages in Book Design
Examples of book pages typeset in various fonts to demonstrate the variations in the overall color of your book page.
Hyphens, Em Dashes, En Dashes—Everything You Need to Know
The use and typesetting of hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes
The Elements of Bad Typography
Editor’s Note: As more examples of “bad typography” appear, I’ll continue to update this article. And hey, you can send me your own examples for inclusion, too. (See the end of the article. Last edit on June 15, 2017.) Typography of one sort or another is all around us. And that’s why bad typography is […]
Free Instruction for Authors: An Abundance of Awesomeness
Hey, it’s the depths of summer here in the northern hemisphere. You know what that means: long days at the pool with the kids; vacation notices bouncing back from my emails; work days that seem to end a lot sooner than in other months. Over here at The Book Designer world headquarters, we rarely take […]
Book Design: The Architecture of the Book Page
Book pages, especially early in the design and construction of your book, are architectural in that they contain basic structural elements that need to be built on strong foundations, allow for ornamentation where appropriate, and pay attention to the execution of the book’s function of transmitting information from author to reader. Well, that was a […]
Hermann Zapf, A Legendary Type Designer
Hermann Zapf, A Legendary Type Designer of Palatino, Optima, Melior, Zapfino and Zapf Dingbats along with some history
Hanging in the Back Matter: Indents Are the Rule
Hanging in the Back Matter: Indents Are the Rule looks at formatting specifications and uses of the hanging indent
5 Favorite Free Fonts for Interior Book Design
5 Favorite Free Fonts for Interior Book Design shows samples and gives information on Theano Didot, Alegreya, Crimson, Gandhi Serif, Rosarivo
