Contemporary fashions play a big part in the title font styling. Choosing the title font for your children’s book cover should take into account current publishing trends. Self-publishers have to be especially careful to achieve a professional result. They want their children’s book to look as mainstream as all the rival books in the store. So the first thing to guard against is an out-of-date title font style.
Having said that, sometimes the full-on modern fonts do not suit a particular story. The mood of your book may be magical or reflective, and the style of your illustrations could be classic or delicate. Your title font should therefore enhance these aspects of the story, even if most on-trend book covers are bold or dashing. On the cover of ‘A Dragon for Christmas‘, we chose an ornate font with a medieval feel, because this suited the theme and style of the story.
Choosing The Title Font
For the title font for ‘A New Friend for Squirrel‘, we picked a style called Hobby Horse, which we selected (after exhaustive scrolling through files of fonts) because of its childlike, traditional ‘vibes’. ‘Water Vole’s Diary‘ has an informal, hand written title font that is still clear enough for young children to read. For both these covers we chose a font colour that related to the colours in the illustration. The ‘Bed and Breakfast‘ cover has a bold title font in a casual style, with upper case letters only. This echoes the informal, humorous story, and the free-booting effect of all the tumbling characters in the cover illustration. The font is in a similar blue colour to the characters’ school uniforms.
Designing the Back Cover
The back cover of ‘Bed and Breakfast’ has a specially designed illustration as a border round the page. Within this border, there is a brief synopsis of the story. ‘Professor Popple and the Little Furry Creature‘ also has a specially designed border illustration and synopsis on the back cover. ‘A New Friend for Squirrel’ has a full page illustration for the back cover, with the synopsis. And ‘Water Vole’s Diary’ has an edited vignette of the story’s main character on the back cover. It is worth making the back cover as attractive as possible, and putting plenty of thought into writing the synopsis, so that it will help persuade the customer to buy the book!
See all these examples in our Children’s Corner. Published by LRM Books.