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Finding the Right Font for <i>Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before</i>

Finding the Right Font for Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before

By Riley Kennysmith

July 16, 2014 by Ooligan Staff Leave a Comment

As the interior designer for Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before, one of my biggest challenges was choosing a font for the book. The obvious first requirement is a font that reads well in large blocks at a small size. With that in mind, I started by collecting a list of fonts that felt stylistically appropriate for the voice and subject matter of Karelia’s book. I fell in love with Caecilia and the way its easy curves and slab serifs felt strong without seeming stodgy.

forgive-caecilia-web

 

But when I did a test run and set a chapter in Caecilia, I found that it didn’t move well when I adjusted tracking, which would make it difficult to fix widows and orphans when laying out the interior. So I crossed that off my list and moved on.

My next choice was Cantoria, which flows beautifully but still manages to feel a bit edgy and daring with its spur serifs and diamond-shaped tittles.

forgive-cantoria-web

It felt appropriate for a book about a girl who wears combat boots as well as elegant floor-length skirts, and it felt appropriate for her story. I was extremely excited to use Cantoria because it was designed in 1986, and thus fits nicely with the timeline of the book. After checking that I liked its italic and that it contained the necessary accented glyphs for the French and Spanish words that pop up occasionally in the book’s dialogues, I made my official decision to use Cantoria for Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before‘s interior.

 

Filed Under: Inside Ooligan Tagged With: book design, fonts, Forgive Me If I've Told You This Before, graphic design, interior design, typefaces

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