BOOK COVER DESIGN

Most Popular Fonts Used on Book Covers

A few years ago Stephen Coles wrote a great article on book cover fonts for FontFeed.com. I think it's still relevant today, and many of my favourites made the list. I recommend you read the whole article, which includes images.

Cole's top 10 list of book cover fonts:

• Minion
• ITC New Bakserville
• FF Scala & FF Scala Sans
• Adobe Garamond (one of my all-time favorite fonts)
• Trade Gothic
• Electra
• Fornier
• Dante
• Din

More Free Fonts for Commercial Use

Whoo hoo. I do love free. I've found several more sources of free fonts that designers can use commercially (although always read the license, I'm not a lawyer and things change), since I made my post a few days ago.  

Another great site with free fonts available for commercial use: COM4T Font Factory Field The license is in with the download file. English is a bit rough, but the main points are there. 

And right on the heels of that great find, I discover a great free font from Oliver Weiss at Walden Font.

I e-Mailed as instructed and received my free font and a 20% discount coupon good for the next ten days on any other Walden fonts I want to buy. I then wrote Mr. Weiss to double check on the terms and he promptly replied that you could indeed use his fonts for logos and commercial projects.  The free font can be found on this page. Isn't it awesome?

And here's a neat trick I found: if you go to the larger commericial font suppliers, they offer a selection of free fonts, many (not all, so again read the license) are free for commercial use. At Fonts.com and at Myfonts.com (go to the area where you plug in the search terms and choose price "free.")
 

Free Fonts for Commercial Use

I seem to be suffering frequent anxiety attacks trying to sort out the End User License Agreements (EULAs) to fonts these days. For years I only had to worry about editable embedding and sharing, but now some font houses put limits on how many glyphs you must use, if it's going to be a "large" commercial project or not (if I could predict this, I'd be retired by now), want credit if I use their fonts in titles (another thing I have little control over as a freelancer, so it's easier to just go with a different font, than worry) and don't want their fonts used in logos. In one instance the EULA I agreed to before buying the font was different than the one that came in the e-mail with the font, and different again from the EULA in the zip file.  It's enough to make a gal grab her hot water bottle and go snuggle with a bunny instead of doing what she loves: designing book covers.

I almost always write the designer or company to clarify what I can and cannot do with a font, as an extra precaution. I just deleted several hundred dollars worth of fonts I've purchased over the last few years and to be honest, I'm to the point I'm probably only going to buy Adobe or ITC fonts from now on. But even then, you can bet I'll be writing and asking for clarification of the EULAs.  

I'm really frustrated over this. It's just impossible to remember what fonts you can do what with, particularly when most of us designers have hundreds, if not thousands of fonts. I have notes to remind me of unusual EULAs stuck all over the office. I have nightmares about the font police knocking at my door! 

It's not all typeface designers, of course. Rob Leuschke of typesetit.com has a great EULA and some of the most wonderful script fonts I've ever seen.

But last night, I was given hope. I like to think it was font Karma rewarding me for my diligent efforts to be an honest font user, but imagine my surprise and delight when I stumbled upon the work of Gluk, whose glyphs just seemed to jump off the screen and embrace my designer's heart. Not since I discovered Ray Larabie's Cretino and his generous EULA, have I gotten so excited over discovering a font designer.

I immediately wrote Gluk, and he responded the next day with the words every girl loves to hear (right?): "You can use these fonts in any (commercial) projects, including logos." Not only that, but he has placed several of his fonts into the public domain or has licensed them under SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1

If you Google "Gluk Fonts" you'll be able to find his collection with ease.

Free Resources for Self-Publishers

START A BLOG ON OPRAH.COM

I discovered that you can have a blog at Oprah.com. You can't directly promote or link off the site, but if you would like to post what you know and love and write about, that seems to be allowed. The blogs have been disabled the last few days, though and I'm not sure if they're coming back, or not. Hope so.

PROMOTE YOUR BOOK AND COMPANY

I also discovered shared-self-publishing.com. I seem to be getting hits off of it and it's free for self-publishers and vendors who want to promote their work. The owner seems very helpful and enthusiastic. I hope the site is successful. It's a refreshing change from some of the pay-us-to-promote-you projects out there.

FACEBOOK GROUP

I started a Facebook called Book Production for Self-Publishers and Small Presses, if anyone is interested in joining.

A Fun New Source for Images

The Smithsonian Institution has placed placed hundreds of its images on Flickr. The ones I've checked have "no known copyright restrictions." Of course, this doesn't give anyone a guarantee or permit you to infringe on someone's likeness (without permission) or trademark, but it is still a very valuable resource, IMO.

Great resource for Non-profit, Christian Publishers and Organizations

I have no idea why I haven't blogged about them before, but if you are responsible for the support and video content of a non-profit, Christian organization, you need to check out Muddy River Media. Seriously, don't waste time reading this, get over there!

Muddy River is the brianchild of Mark Fogarty, who lives in Nova Scotia, Canada. Muddy River offers all materials free of charge. The ever-growing collection includes everything from videos, to music, to animations, quizzes and games, street interviews and photographs. These can be used online, during services on backdrops or in almost any other way you want to use them, as long as it's non-commercial.

You can search their archives via Biblical verse, theme, media type, genre or producer and there are even small-group series and instructional series materials available. Quite a time saver if you're working on the creative end of things for your church or organization.

Mark has a strong background in youth ministries, which is readily apparent in his lively, humorous and entertaining style that will capture the attention of today's stimuli-overloaded youth. His instructional videos for ideas to support abstract concepts with entertaining games and visuals are top-notch.

Muddy River has uploaded samples of their videos to YouTube, so you can check them out without having to sign up on the site (which is far easier than they indicate, by the way, although I'm not sure how long my "Heathen Sinner" account will last. I didn't really have a non-profit organization to use and it was required).

Sanity saving plugin for Adobe Illustrator

A regular client needed me to do some updates on a cover I'd created in Illustrator CS some time ago. Usually this is no problem, but this time he wanted me to underline bits and pieces of words throughout the text. Problem. Illustrator does not offer any faux text properties: no strikethrough, no underlines, no faux bold or faux italic.

In order to create the underline, I'd have to do it manually, measuring and lining up every little line, and then readjusting all the lines every time the text shifted for changes.

There had to be an easier way, so off I went to Google and sure enough, there were some work-arounds to the problem. But, none were so easy as this handy little free download that you simply add on through Character Styles. Once installed, all you need to do is highlight the text you want underlined, chose the new underline option and there it is!

You'll find the download link in the first comment on this blog.

Test Your Digital Printer Before Going Into Production

This is an incredible idea! You can barely logon to any site that mentions printing and publishing without finding a debate on the best printing methods and companies. Offset, long regarded as superior, is being replaced by digital print, which is far less expensive for short press runs; but is the quality there with digital? If high quality can be achieved on a digital press, which types of presses and which companies are doing the best job?

Fourteen students attending a workshop at Germany's Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences,  joined Professor Frank Philippin and designer James Goggin in testing the limits of the digital offerings from Lulu.com.

They created a book that included every conceivable element of design and sent it off to be printed by Lulu. Colored text, rich black and 100% black text was used; Images in CMYK, RGB, half-tone and grayscale were placed alongside each other for comparison; Line patterns, font weight and even trim accuracy was put to the test. On page 68, you'll find this simple statement: "One word in this sentence is coloured rich black. Can you guess which one?" PURE GENIUS!!! Dear Lulu, Please try and print these line, colour, format, texture, and typography tests for us, does it all.

Consumers can purchase the book (thereby testing Lulu themselves) from Lulu for $19.00. But, there's a free, PDF download that you can send to your own printer (CreateSpace comes to mind) to test their capabilities.

I can't wait to try this out.

Above is one of the several pages that tests RGB, CMYK,

half-tone and grayscale images.

  

 

And for anyone who has ever had the frustration of a poor trim, slanted pages or text running into the binding, you'll appreciate this test from page 92.

 

 

Font Roll

I've never figured out why so many self-publishers use Times to lay out book interiors. It was designed for narrow columns and can be awkward to work with on a wider page. It's also the default typeface of so many word processing programs, that is as common as ice cubes. Not to mention, it has become almost a trademark of POD books and sure-fire way to let people know your book is self-published.

Times, Arial, Helvetica, Comic Sans and now the over-used Papyrus, need to be set aside and more interesting choices given consideration. There are tens of thousands of fonts out there and hundreds of them would work great for setting text in a book.

A few years ago book publishers started crediting images and designers on the cover or copyright page, and they've also been doing the same with fonts.

If you find a book that is nicely done, check the copyright page and see if it tells you what font they've used.

Here is a list of some I've found:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: 12 pt Adobe Garamond. (There is an article about Garamond in our free eZine, K Means Black).

Angela's Ashes (hardcover): Bembo (Bitstream produces a look-a-like called Aldine 401 that's far less expensive).

The Secret Life of Bees: Granjon; Display font: Pouty Ornaments: Bodini

The Memory Keeper's Daughter: Granjon

Three Cups of Tea: Stempel Garamond

Four FREE and GREAT Programs I Discovered This Week

Inkscape Does The Vector Work For You

The week started off with me spending hours creating vector images in Illustrator CS, that does not have live trace. I yearned to try live trace and while researching various forums to see if it really was the be all and end all of vector-creation, I was led to a completely free program called Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org.) I don't usually like to download and install new programs on my own, but was in a daring mood that night and did it, anyway.

Wow.

I mean Wow.

I played with that for days, converting photos I had taken into beautiful, full-color vectors. Wow. The only drawback is that if you get too carried away, you'll end up with 100+ meg EPS files.

That led me to another problem. Windows, in all its wisdom, wouldn't allow me to delete the files. I could reboot until the cows left again and every time I tried to delete I'd get a message saying the file was being used by another program.

Deleting Problem Files In Windows On A PC

In searching for a solution to this problem I discovered Unlocker Assistant at,
http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/. It too is a free program, but they accept donations. I installed it and once again was blown away. To get rid of the unwanted files, all I had to do was right click on the file and poof, it would give me an option to delete and it worked. It also told me what program was tying up my files; Turns out it was Internet Explorer. Go figure.

Free Plugin Checks Vector Paths

Now, after doing all this, I had to make sure that all those vector paths were closed in my new artwork, and if you use Illustrator, you know this can be tricky. That's when I was told about a free Adobe Plugin called The Select Menu Plugin (CS and CS2) that allows you to check for open paths, closed paths and much, much more right from Illustrator's select dropdown. It worked like a charm. The program is available here, http://rj-graffix.com/software/plugins.html. It saved me hours of work and I can't recommend it enough.

Make Your Own Grunge Brush Font for $9

Then, this morning, I discovered the coolest way to create your own grunge brushes that will work in any program. I have many little vector fleurons that I use to create backgrounds. I create larger projects by piecing together the small fleurons and scrolls, but I was thinking today that it would be great to have a font made with the basic shapes. Then I discovered Fontifier (http://www.fontifier.com/). At this site you can submit your handwriting and have it turned into a font. The test is free and you can see the font before you purchase it (USD $9). I downloaded their template, pasted all my little fleurons and shapes into the designated squares in Illustrator, exported a 100 dpi jpg and uploaded it to their system. Now, as you can imagine, this did not give me a good quality glyph (I hear it works great for handwriting though, which it was designed for). What it did give me was a really convenient way to create a grunge effect in my artwork. I just used my battered font glyphs! You can add dozens of them and have them all there, in any program, to use at your convenience.