I commission custom art for the IT Mastery books, but do the text layout myself. Most often, I use the Minion Pro for the body font and Myriad Pro for the display font. They’re staid, reliable, and unremarkable. On rare occasion, the topic demands a particular font. That’s straightforward; I must distort the design until the font fits.
When a book requires a specific kind of font, but not a single font, things get hard.
The cover for OpenZFS Mastery is an old Mediterraniean vase. It needs a font that looks like it’s from the Roman Empire or ancient Greece. There’s lots of fonts for that, no?
Yes. Hundreds of fonts.
Each promising candidate needs a test cover. Here’s some of what I’ve run through trying to find one that works.
This is a nifty font. I like the central line. The title doesn’t really stand out, though. Next candidate.
The title stands out better, but looks kind of… janky?
Maybe a different approach.
That flows too well. It looks modern, not like it was carved into unbaked clay. Try again.
I like the look of this font, but the title doesn’t stand out well enough.
Okay, this is pretty good. The title stands out nicely and is legible at a distance. The U is kind of odd, making the author names look like JLIDE and LLKAS.
After spending a couple hours searching through fonts, I have exhausted my visual analysis energy. Adonias it is, for now. I’ll see if I can find better some other day.
When you wonder why cover designers charge so much? This is why.