Superfamilies — and 12 -tips for designing books
Type superfamilies for designing books.
Superfamilies are serif and sans serif paired type families. They are perfect for designing books. First of all, within each typeface, you can also select regular, italic, bold, and bold italic. Some typefaces also have other fonts such as thin, heavy, medium, display, caption, and more.
Don’t use too many typefaces and fonts! One of the hallmarks of good design is a clean look. It is imperative when designing books. Superfamilies give you more options, but don’t use all the fonts within a typeface or their family. Text and headline should contrast.
Designing books and the use of typefaces.
Beautiful, classic or modern typefaces. Great type design deserves to cost more. You may think that Arial or Georgia are good enough typefaces to use for your book. That may be fine if you are writing a cheap paperback. But, even then — not in my opinion — especially for a high-quality book that you expect to sell for a higher price point. If you skimp, it will show. Invest in text typefaces that are rock-solid and dependable. The amateur self-publisher may think they know how to design books, but …
… We love it when self-publishers give us their design ideas. They often know it isn’t quite right, but can’t tell what is wrong. They love our professional book design! That’s what we do.
12 tips for designing books:
- Invest in a solid typeface for the book’s text pages. Consider using superfamilies.
- Use a typeface that has glyphs and alternate characters.
- Know the differences among hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes are, and how to use them.
- Use proper quote marks, not inch marks.
- Learn the difference between RGB and CMYK, as it pertains to book printing and designing books.
- Know the parts of a book and their order.
- Be proficient in InDesign.
- Set up pages properly, using masters, page numbering, headers and / or footers.
- Add automatic page numbers.
- Odd numbers are always on right-hand pages in printed books, and even numbers on left-hand pages.
- The first page of a book is always a right hand page, but it’s not always number “1”. The answer is when Roman numerals are used in front matter, and when the page number on a particular page should not show; like on the title page and copyright page.
- Define and use Character and Paragraph styles.
- Maintain generous margins and use of white space.
- Text type size should be 10, 11, or 12 point, depending on the weight of the font and the x-height. Use at least 2 pts between lines. I prefer 3 pts. or more.
And now, drum roll … type superfamilies examples.
Some examples of superfamilies for designing books:
- Benton Modern and Benton Sans
- Celeste and Celeste Sans
- Charlotte and Charlotte Sans
- Dancer Serif and Dancer Sans
- Eureka and Eureka Sans
- Freight Text and Freight Sans
- Frutiger Serif and Frutiger
- Lucida Serif and Lucida Sans
- Meta Serif and Meta Sans
- Museo and Museo Sans
- Officina and Officina Sans
- Rotis Serif and Rotis Sans
- Scala and Scala Sans
- Stone Serif and Stone Sans
- Thesis TheSerif and Thesis TheSans
In conclusion, try out superfamilies when you are designing your book. Try the 12 tips too. If you need us, we are here. We can design your book … professionally.
