My New Favourite Font

The final result.

The paperback version of Aundes Aura has seen many small changes since it was first released. The biggest change was switching out the font on the front cover, but that was only the latest thing to change. Before that, it went through a few other alterations as I tried to maximise its aesthetics. The font of the interior was my main focus.

Its original font was Garamond, which came with Word. But the italics weren't doing it for me, and italics are meant to look good. I mean, the font should look good in general, but italics . . . italics are something special. Is that just me? Garamond's italics had capital letters that leant a funny way, and the tails of the letters had a weird swirl.

Though Garamond was the best choice Word offered, I discovered there were better options out there which could be found online. There were free options, and paid professional options. I started with a free option that was popular.

Cardo I thought was a nice font. A step up from Garamond, it had an old literature kind of look that would suit historical fiction. So, Aundes Aura being a fantasy, I thought it would suit. PDFs wouldn't encode it properly, though, and when I received my proof, I came across italics that had defaulted to some kind of basic font that was not Cardo. At first I tried to convince myself that the book looked better with Cardo (and it did save for the italics), but in the end I came to the conclusion that overall, this font looked crappy. The bad italics ruined it.

You know, there are a lot of italics in fantasy. Not only are there character thoughts, but there are letters being written, letters being read, songs being sung, dreams being dreamt, and other languages being languaged. (That's right, you heard me. (Or at least you would have if I was reading this blog out loud.))

At last I came to the final step in my journey. In online discussions the words "Minion Pro" kept coming up. This was a popular font, and many complained that it was too popular. But there is always a reason things become popular. Sometimes it's a trend, and other times, it's just that good. I gather Minion Pro is popular for the second reason, because when I went to search it out I fell in love. I don't care what font anyone else is using as long as I'm doing my best to make my book look good. Minion Pro was better-looking than Garamond and Cardo. And I can't imagine anything looking better.

I would describe Minion Pro as soft and calm. Clean. Inviting. Beautiful.