Fonts question for cover designers or people who make their own covers

You can buy individual fonts to use on your covers, no need to buy special software. Just download them onto your computer and away you go. The only thing to watch out for is any licensing restrictions for their use, particularly if you download free fonts.

If you literally type the word "fonts" into Google, a load of sites come up, both paid and free. Most will show you what your title / author name will look like in a chosen font or range of fonts before you buy/download.

Try Fontsquirrel. It's free fonts that are licensed for commercial work. You will have to check the license on whatever fonts you find randomly on the internet. Some are only free for individual use and others have weird restrictions, like I ran into one that specified it was only free for uses compatible with Christian values.

Google fonts is a good source for free fonts with non-restrictive licences (generally SIL or Apache licences). If you get any Adobe Creative Cloud (e.g., InDesign) then that includes free access to their fonts which is what I use nowadays. Before purchasing make sure that you like the look of the actual letters that you are going to use. Both Google and Adobe let you type in the text to see it for yourself. Although this is less of an issue for covers than for internal text for print books.

MyFonts has lots of good quality typefaces, most of them are paid but there are also some free ones there too. They also have special deals that might be useful.

I've downloaded fonts from 1001fonts, dafont, Font Squirrel, and also sometimes from individual blogs. It's kind of addictive, actually. Downloading and installing fonts is very easy. Most of the time, after downloading the font, you'll see whatever license is attached to it. That is the best place to see the actual wishes of the designer, because a lot of times you can download a font because a site posted it as free for commercial use, only to find out the designer would like attribution or only wants the font used for personal use after all, unless you pay for a commercial license.

My publishing partner is a professional art director for many years in traditional publishing. She designs all of our book covers and uses Veer.com and Fonts.com. They aren't free on those sites, but are very high quality.

I use http://www.fontspace.com/. They've got some pretty good ones, free, that can be used commercially. What I really like about their site is that you can type in what you're going to use the font for, so you can see it (the title of your book, for instance) in the different fonts. It's fun to mess around with.

DaFont is typically my go-to. Not all of their fonts are free for commercial use, but you can filter each font category by which fonts are free. However, as a cover designer, I am definitely bookmarking some of the places people are suggesting!

I've used most of the places mentioned above, and this one is my contribution https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/

Thanks so much everyone. I will have a look at those. I did download some free ones off the net once and could get them into the right place so they come up as an option on my photo editing software. I have no idea how to do that.

Remember that you can tweak the fonts with a shadow, outline, gloss, etc., in Photoshop and other software.

Doglover said:

Thanks so much everyone. I will have a look at those. I did download some free ones off the net once and could get them into the right place so they come up as an option on my photo editing software. I have no idea how to do that.

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As I recall, you download the font and double click on it and it pretty much installs on your computer to be available for all your software.

If it doesn't seem to be available, Google something like "using downloaded fonts on [name of my software]" and you should find your answer. Perhaps it got installed in the wrong folder, or you need to re-start the software or something. Try it with a random font from the free Squirrel site mentioned above and see how you get on. When I did it with Photoshop and InDesign, it was fairly simple.

Doglover said:

Thanks so much everyone. I will have a look at those. I did download some free ones off the net once and could get them into the right place so they come up as an option on my photo editing software. I have no idea how to do that.

Click to expand...

If you are using a newer version of Windows you should be able to type the word "font" into your computer's search function in the start menu and the path for where to place the fonts you are using should open up. Then download a new font, unzip it if necessary and drag it into the proper fonts folder. Then when you open your photo editing software it should be there.

If not, you'll need to go into the folder for the photo editing software and find the fonts folder the software uses. Then the same process applies.

I mainly use Google fonts. The search engine is easy. With other sites I check for attribution requirements and avoid those. I'm all for giving people credit, but I don't have time to keep track of which fonts have to have which credit.

I saved the sites everyone posted. Now I'm in trouble, because as someone else mentioned, fonts are addictive.

Doglover said:

Thanks so much everyone. I will have a look at those. I did download some free ones off the net once and could get them into the right place so they come up as an option on my photo editing software. I have no idea how to do that.

Click to expand...

Depending upon which system you're using, you might be able to install your fonts here:

Computer>C Drive>Windows>Fonts

You'd need to unzip your font first and only place the relevant files in the fonts folder (not the 'read me' files etc)

The new fonts should then show up in any editing program you're using, definitely in photoshop

If you really are serious and plan to invest, and want to spend time doing typography then I suggest Suitcase Fusion. It is fantastic to use and easy to keep track of your fonts for organizational purposes.

I buy a lot of fonts on Creative Market. They're mostly from indie designers, and the fonts aren't really too expensive. Plus, they often have great promos and deals!

I always use dafont.com , they are all free and it has a feature where you enter your text and you can preview them in the browser.