The Evolution of a Book Cover (2) – Fonts

Next up, we’re looking at fonts. As a reminder, this is the last image we had:

Beautiful cover, but we weren’t happy with the fonts. This was a little too upfront and traditional for the dark fantasy LitRPG that Grayson wrote.

This was the first attempt at a font change. We wanted something a little more gothic and creepy, but this just didn’t work. It’s a little gothic, but the lack of a capital H was just off-putting.

I was playing around with some ideas and Bonnie Price came to my rescue. We located a few copyright free font options and I then proceeded to (badly) slap them on to see how they looked.

Another attempt at a different font made the Hive Knight option much more upstanding. Not exactly what we wanted, but I like the font itself.

The next version used a more twisted display, without being outright ‘dripping’ with darkness or green sickly light. After all, we want to leave a little mystery. 🙂

Once I figured out the proper font, I had Luciano revise that to get out proper image:

Much better, no? With a proper font designer involved, the font jumps out even more than my pitiful attempts.

Hopefully, watching the evolution of font and font choices can give you an idea of the importance of fonts itself and how it can hint or reveal things about the book to your readers.

Curious about the book?

Download a short story in the Ouroboros Project world written by Grayson Sinclair called Swords of Legend: In Remembrance for free!

You’ll be promoted to add yourself to our mailing list to be informed when Hive Knight releases on August 17, 2020.

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