Text for Children's books
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Where does everyone get their fonts for children's books? Is it typical for the artist to create the font or is it common/permissible to use an existing one?
Thanks for any thoughts!
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@Jeremiahbrown so many options here!
If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, it includes access to Adobe Fonts that you can use for commercial use. Other places to get free commercial use fonts are Google Fonts and fontsquirrel.com — but one thing to mention: you need to check on what license is offered with that font and make sure it covers everything you want to use it for. Sometimes paying for the exact font you want to use is the way to go — usually fonts are pretty affordable but they can get expensive. Fontspring is another font website that I recommend.
Some illustrators and book designers use hand lettered titles or even hand letter the entire text. Philip and Erin E. Stead create woodblock or monoprint titles for their books. Some illustrators (Dan Santat being one) have created their own handwritten font and use it in multiple books. “Millions of Cats” by Wanda Ga’g (generally considered to be the first children’s picture book) was entirely hand lettered. I’ve personally been hand lettering my own titles for the last few books I’ve worked on (using Procreate and/or traditionally with some Photoshop help), since it’s easier to achieve a cohesive composition that works with the byline and other fonts that may be used on the cover.
There is no one rule. It really seems to be what works best for each individual book.
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Awesome, thank you so much! That is a huge help.
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@Jeremiahbrown you’re so welcome!
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@Jeremiahbrown I love google fonts personally! They are free to use and you can type your text in to see what looks good, they also recommend other fonts that pair nicely with it
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@carlianne I have not heard of that! Cool! I will have to check that out. I have been using dafont.com myself, and just very recently the adobe suite fonts. It is niceto hear about other sources.
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@chrisaakins be careful with dafont, most fonts are not licensed for commercial use and I’ve heard sometimes there’s viruses on dodgy ones. Plus some are very poorly made. As mentioned above Google fonts are good and fontsquirrel.com are all commercially licensed.
If you ever want to collect your open artwork files (not a flat PDF) to be printed then any fonts from Adobe Typekit will not be collected (when collecting for output from InDesign, I’ve not tried collecting for output from Illustrator yet it’s quite a new feature) so would be missing unless they have the fonts already or have a Creative Cloud subscription (which is highly likely if you are sending to a printer but it’s best to check).
