Supposedly, serifs lead the eye from one letter to the next, making the reading experience easier and less tiring - although there isn’t actually much scientific evidence in favor of this.

To serif or not to serif?Īlthough you may not know the serif by name, you’ll definitely have noticed these little lines or strokes coming off the end of letters in certain fonts like Times New Roman (and the modified Times font that we use here on the Reedsy blog!). Though you obviously want your font to look nice on the page, it also needs to do its job and be easily readable so that readers can immerse themselves in your words without getting distracted or having to decipher what things say. It may be the most gorgeous thing to look at, but if it’s uncomfortable to sit on, then what use is it really? The same goes for fonts. Having said that, there are a few things that any discerning book designer will want to keep in mind. With the exception of a few universally reviled typefaces - cough cough, Comic Sans - almost any legible font can be considered. How to choose a book fontĬhoosing the 'right' font to use for a book's body matter often comes down to individual taste. However, for convenience’s sake, we’re going to be using the term ‘font’ to refer to both the overall styles of type and their variations. ‘Fonts’, on the other hand, are size, weight and style variations on typefaces, like 12 pt Times New Roman bold and 14 pt Arial italic. True typography experts will be quick to point out how the term ‘font’ is commonly misused in everyday, non-technical conversation.įor typographers, ‘typefaces’ are different lettering designs, like Times New Roman and Arial. They will have Heading 3.Before we get started, let’s clear up a terminological detail. So Mars is Heading 2.Īnd the Phobos and Deimos, which are the moons of Mars. I can just go through my document and choose the heading. Should this be 14 point font? Should it be a different color? I don’t have to worry about that.

Now The Planets, that’s going to be a different heading, so I can do Heading 2 and I don’t have to worry about well it’s 16 point font for Heading 1, what should. So I can go through my document this way. So let me click Asteroids and hit Heading 1 again. Kind of just what I did there with three steps, I can do with styles. The Planets here, I’m going to hit Heading 1 and it has just given me some spacing. I am going to go up here to the Quick Styles, which is up here in the ribbon. I can do all those steps: change font, change spacing, change color with headings. Now if I have to do this for each of my headings, I know about Format Painter, so I can take this format, go over up here to Format Painter in the ribbon, click on that and now everything I touch will be painted like that.īut if I am doing that for a lot of headings, I have to go through my entire document. If you go up to the paragraph in the ribbon here in this little triangle on the bottom right-hand corner, that will open your Paragraph settings.Īnd after I am going to put a little six point. So let’s get away from the carriage return and maybe you know about, ooh, spacing. Maybe?Ĭarriage returns are bad, especially if you’re continuing typing because now you’re in that font. So let’s kind of I don’t know about that. What should I do for a heading? Well, let’s make it a color. Here is my author thing and I am going to try to center that, and I’ll make a little smaller, I guess. I might take my title here and okay I want to center that. Here’s what I would normally do if I didn’t know about styles. So, here we have an unformatted document about the Solar system. As soon as they click this thing, and they look at fonts they’re gone for five minutes, right?īut what I am going to show you is the advantages of doing that. It’s a little tough if you come from the old typewriter age, or if you are a kid, I know, because I have a couple of teenagers. Work on formatting your document afterwards. I think it is attributed to Stephen King who says, “Don’t get it right (air quotes right), get it written.”

Word font to use to write less