Font and Font size for 8x11 book
Seamus:
I know nothing about typography and layout, but I have 6 months to figure it out for our first release (if I can't do it in that time, I guess I'll have to plunk down money for a Layout person). We are making a Spy-themed game, and I thought Courier would be a nice headline font, paired with Future Bk body text. My first question is, does anyone think either of these, or the combination of the two, doesn't work?
The game book will be 128 pages, 8x11. I want the font to be readable. My eye sight isn't so good, and some of those twin columned small font books give me a lot of trouble. Is 12 points of Future Bk way too large for a published book? Would it look awful in one column. Sorry if these are remedial questions, I just have a lot to learn, and I want to make sure our book doesn't look terrible.
Vulpinoid:
The first bit of advice you'll hear from most typographers, layout artists, graphic designers and editors..."Don't use more than 2 fonts in a work".
You've got that covered, so you're doing better than a lot of first timers.
Beyond that, the best advice I could give you is to come up with a couple of mock-up pages. One for a chapter title page, one for a regular page, and then maybe a third that contains some type of table or graphic in it.
Don't worry about using the real text from the book at this stage, and don't get too precious about the appearances. At this point you're just trying to make sure it looks good, and is legible. Play with font sizes up and down a couple of points, some fonts work better in 13-14 pts, others are still pretty legible in 10-11 pts. You may need to play with kerning and leading (the spacing between individual words and the row space between lines), these two factors can play just an important role in legibility as font size.
Once you think the mock-up pages look good to your eyes, show them to a couple of other people. Most will probably say "that looks fine", or something similar, but someone might point out a problem that you hadn't noticed. Make adjustments based on that feedback, but make sure it still looks good in your eyes. After all, it's your project.
It's a bit like the feedback loop involved in playtesting.
Eventually you'll hit something where you say, "That's what I want!!!", then use your mock-up pages as templates to lay out the entire book.
The process isn't that hard, it doesn't even need expensive programs, but it can be time consuming.
Just some ideas...
V
Luke:
Try Futura 10 pt over 13 pt leading. If you're going to do a single column, make it 3.5" wide in the center of the page. No wider.
If you want to hit 128 pages, you're going to have to keep your font size relative to the amount of text you want in the book. My books have 250-300 words per page. They're 304 pages long. I use a nice 9/12 Bauer Bodoni. Of course, Mouse Guard uses a positively airy 10 pt Tiepolo over 14 pt leading. That's very readable.
Best thing to do is find a book you like and copy it note for note.
-L
Lance D. Allen:
I have been a fan of Palatino Linotype ever since someone suggested it to me a few years back as a body font. It's larger than Times New Roman at the same font size, so is better legible at smaller sizes. It's an easy to read serifed font with a bit more personality than Times, as well.
I have no specific opinion about your proposed font combination. I'd have to see them laid out as you're considering before I could really give one. My gut says 12pt is too big, though.. But I tend to be the oddball when it comes to that. I like small icons on my desktop, and small fonts, because it just seems like you can fit more information in a given space. Information density isn't necessarily a desirable trait in laying out a book, though.
Gregor Hutton:
I'd echo what Luke says. Go browse some books in a shop or library and find something you like. Then mimic that layout as best you can. It probably helps to see what other people have done to make a book "feel" like a spy-themed book.
If you want a larger font for readability then my feeling is that 12 pt will seems too large, but you'll maybe find 9 pt text too small. I have a soft spot for 10 on 12 pt (that is a 10 pt font with 12 pt line spacing) or 11 on 13 pt.
A column of text should ideally have no more than 9-11 characters per line on average, so as Luke says a 3.5-inch column should be as wide as you go. It will also leave room for marginal notes. A single column as wide as the page in 8x11 format would be hard going. The line length will be too long and you'll get lost skipping from one line to the next when reading. You can use the full width when presenting multi-column tables, though.
Courier is a "typewriter" type of font, and it might work well for the spy feel as a header. It will work in a heading but I would not use it for body text. It's also quite common (which can be both good or bad, of course). There are some other typewriter type fonts that are distressed or slightly different so maybe look at other "typewriter" fonts too.
For body text, I would say the simplest and most readable fonts are serif fonts like Times or Palatino. Modern sans serifs can be readable too. If you look on somewhere like www.adobe.com/type you can search by use. Try looking under "Body text (books, journals, magazines". I see ones such as Bauer Bodoni, Caslon, Frutiger, Gill Sans, Jenson, Minion, Myriad, Optima, Palatino, Sabon, Warnock. There's a mix of serif and sans serif in there, but they should all be highly readable over large amounts of writing.
I think Futura might be better for short text blocks rather than longer runs of text that your book may have.
When you have a large sample block of text and images, try making some layout pages with a few different fonts to see how they work (or not) for you.
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