The design of your book has a critical part to play in how readable it is. Whether you’re designing the book yourself, or hiring a professional book designer, it pays to understand the basic building blocks that books are made of. Type fonts and they way they are arranged on the page—typography.
After deciding on the size of your book, the next big design decision is picking a type font for the body of your book. Although many classic book typefaces look similar they can have a sizable affect on the overall look and readability of the page.
Here are some articles that will give you a little background in book typography:
5 Favorite Fonts for Interior Book Design
3 Great Typeface Combinations You Can Use in Your Book
There are thousands of type faces avaialbe for digital typography, most of which are available for download at various type foundries on the web. But very few of these fonts are used for books.
Classic Book Typefaces
Most of the typefaces we use for books are classic typefaces, either oldstyle or transitional designs. The designs of these typefaces trace their roots to the very infancy of printing, in the years when printing with type first spread from Germany thoughout Europe.
It was in Italy that the earliest type designers and book printers created many of the letterforms that influence us today. You could say that our culture has grown up, grown literate, and grown learned through the agency of these typefaces, and I think that’s one of the reasons they have such a firm place in our cultural history.
Here’s an article I wrote for Self-Publishing Review that will give you some idea of the kind of history embedded in our typefaces:
Deconstructing Bembo: Typographic Beauty and Bloody Murder
Typography on the Book Page
When you start designing and laying out your pages in whatever program you’re using, you want your book to look professional. You can do this by conforming to standard conventions and making good choices.
Here are some articles that deal with the makeup of book pages:
Elements of the Book Page
5 Layout Mistakes that Make You Look Unprofessional
The Title Page
The Poetry of the Typography of Poetry
Book Page Layout for a Long Narrative
The Typographer’s Curse: Automatic Leading
The Coming of the EBooks
Behind the self-effacing practice of book design lies the history of the printed book, and all the marvelous innovators and printers who came before us. While we don’t yet know how far books will travel away from the classical models that have ruled book design for centuries, we can be sure that digitization and the evolution of ebooks will change typography forever.
Now we’re just seeing the beginnings of what will eventually become a robust capacity for typographic design. Caution though, it may be a bit rocky getting there:
Apple iPad Typography: Fonts We Actually Want
iPad’s ePub: The “Book” of the Future?
Books on the iPad’s iBookstore
Your book is taking shape now, starting to look like the book it will become. Tasteful and readable typography will do its part to help make your book stand out from the crowd. As your book moves closer to completion, you’ll move on to our next topic, Making Print Choices. Onward.
This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer site.