This Month's Topic: Typography Tips

People always say “You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.” While that’s certainly true, the same doesn’t necessarily hold for the inside of your books. If your typography makes your book difficult to read, users will put it down – and it won’t take them long to make that decision. Here are a few helpful typography tips to make your books as pleasing on the inside as they are outside:

Minimize text treatments – Carefully consider the use of italicized, boldface and all-caps font treatments. Depending on your subject matter and the organization of your copy, you may want to relegate their usage to titles, chapter headings and footnotes.

Choose fonts carefully – One common mistake we see with text layouts is the overuse of different typefaces. For most book applications, three different fonts – one for chapter headings, one for your table of contents, and one for the rest of the book – is sufficient. Very often, varying the point size of your fonts will achieve the same effect as using an additional font.

Tracking, kerning and leading, oh my! – These are the three elements that determine line spacing. Tracking refers to the space across a line of text; kerning is the space between each letter; and leading refers to the space between each line. All three should be set to appear consistently throughout your book.

Work from style sheets – All of these factors can be handled easily and consistently by creating style sheets in your text layout program. Style sheets will also make the processing of flowing text much faster.

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