Design Terminology

Like editors, book designers have their own terminology. While it isn't essential that authors know the ins and outs of the design process, understanding the language that designers use can help authors to communicate more effectively with the people who create the covers and interior layouts of their books. This leads to a more efficient and satisfactory experience since you can let the designers know exactly what you want in their language.

Here is a list of terms that refer to the design and layout of the images and text on the page.

Bad Break: a bad break occurs when a word needs to be broken at the end of a line and the hyphen is in an awkward place that can make reading and understanding the word difficult. Consult your dictionary of choice to see where words should be broken, but generally, words should be broken into their syllables.

e.g. Bad Breaks: dra-gon, ma-iden, pira-te

Good Breaks: drag-on, maid-en, pi-rate

Bleed: elements that extend beyond the trim so the printed area goes to the edge of the page in the final publication.

CMYK: colour pallet used for printing. Stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black). Creates colour using ink in a subtractive process. All colours together create black.

Crop Marks: printed lines that show where the trims are to be made.

Dingbat: a typographical symbol or ornament.

e.g.

Folio: the page number or a fancy word for page.

Footer: text the runs along the bottom of a page. Usually includes one or more of folios, author name, book name, chapter title or part title. Not every book with have a footer.

Four-Colour Printing: see Full Colour Printing.

Full-Colour Printing: uses CMYK to produce any colour you can think of in printing.

Gutter: the space in a printed book where the pages are joined together. Also called the inside margin. It is important there is no text here as it can be very difficult to read. The gutter also refers to the white space between columns on a single page.

Half-title Page: a page displaying just the title of the book. The title is usually either in a basic font or stylized the same as on the title page. Often the first printed page of a book, but not always included.

Header: text that runs along the top of a page. Usually the author and book title, but can also include the chapter, part or series title, or a folio.

Ladders: when the same character (usually hyphens) or word appears at the end of multiple consecutive lines.

e.g. She fell.

He fell.

They fell.

Margin: the white space that creates a border around printed text or images.

Non-Breaking Hyphens: a hyphen that is integral to the spelling of the word and used to format hyphenated compounds. Non-breaking hyphens keep the letters on either side of the hyphen on the same line of text.

Orphans: when the first line of a paragraph is the last line on a page.

RGB: colour pallet used for digital or light displays. Stands for red, green, blue. Creates colour using an additive process. All colours combined create white.

Recto: the right hand page of a printed book.

Rivers: unintentional white space within text that distracts the eye. Usually in a serpentine-like shape.

Signature: a large sheet of paper that is used to print books. A signature is printed on both sides of the sheet and contains book pages in multiples of 4, with 16 per page (8 per side) being the most common. These are used to reduce paper waste and speed up printing. Once the paper has been printed, it is folded and trimmed to the correct size.

Soft Hyphen: breaks a word if it is found at the end of a line, but is invisible when the word isn't. These hyphens are added at the formatting stage of a manuscript as they are dependent on where the words fall on a page.

Title Page: part of the front matter. Includes the title, subtitle and author and ca also include the publisher. Is often styled to match the front cover.

Trim: the final dimensions of a published book.

Type Safety: the space inside the trim that ensures text or images aren't trimmed from the final book.

Verso: the left hand page of a book.

White Space: any space on the page that is not taken up by text, images or figures. Managing the white space is a big part of design as it has a major effect on readability.

Widows: the last line of a paragraph that falls at the top of the page or when a single word falls on the last line of a paragraph.

Fonts and Lettering

While as an author it isn't necessary to know all the terms associated with fonts, knowing some key terms can make it easier to communicate exactly what you're looking for to your designer.

Arm: a portion of a letter that extends upwards and outwards, like both lines of a V.

Ascender: a vertical stroke that extends above the x-height, like in an h.

Bar: a horizontal stroke found in letters like A and f.

Baseline: the line on which the text is set. Letters like x, without acenders, sit on the baseline.

Bowl: a curved stroke that creates an enclosed, curved space like in a B.

Cap-Height: the height of the capital letters of a typeface. Measured using a flat-bottomed letter like an E.

Counters: the enclosed space in letters, like in an O or a.

Decender: a vertical stroke that extends below the baseline like in a p.

Font: a particular size, weight and style of a typeface.

Font Family: see typeface.

Leg: a portion of a letter that extends down and outwards, like the lower right stroke of a K.

Monospaced Font: A font where each letter occupies the same amount of horizontal space.

e.g. Roboto Mono

Old-Style Figures: a numbering style where numbers have different heights to better blend in with letters.

e.g. 1984

Proportional Font: A font where each letter has its own width.

e.g. Roboto

Serif: a short line found at the end of a stroke in a serif typeface. Sans serif typefaces (like the one this blog is written in) do not have serifs.

Shoulder: the portion of lowercase h, n and m that curves down to the right.

Spine: the curved centre section of an S.

Stem: the main vertical stroke of a letter. Also refers to the left hand diagonal stroke in letters like A and W.

Stroke: the lines that make up a letter.

Tail: the decorative descender of a capital Q.

Terminal: the end of a stroke in a sans serif typeface.

Typeface: The specific design of the letters, numbers and symbols that make up text. Variations in size, weight, slope (italics vs. non-italic) and width represent a different font of the typeface.

X-Height: the measurement of the height of lowercase letters of a typeface.

Typefaces

A typeface is a collection of letters and other typographical marks (periods, exclamation marks, ampersands) that share similar forms, commonly referred to as fonts. While there are thousands of typefaces, they generally fall into three main categories that can be further broken down into categories based on shared characteristics. When choosing fonts for a project, it is usually best to find those that are complementary.

Serif Typefaces

Serif typefaces are commonly used for body text in print. The short lines that appear at the end of the strokes (serifs) help facilitate a smooth reading experience. Serif typefaces tend to look more traditional and elegant that sans serif fonts.

Serif typefaces can be broken down into four main categories:

Old-Style: a traditional serif typeface characterized by high contrast of thick and thin lines within each letter form. This is the oldest style of serif typefaces, giving them a classic, traditional look. e.g. Garamond

Transitional: contains more contrast between stroke thickness and has wider, bracketed serifs. These are among the most commonly used typefaces, including Times New Roman.

Slab Serif: typefaces with thick, blocky serifs. e.g. Clarendon

Didone: the most modern of the serif typefaces, these are characterized by high contrast in stroke thickness. They are not intended for large blocks of text and are primarily used as display fonts. e.g. Didot

Sans Serif Typefaces

Sans serif typefaces doen't have serifs on the ends of the letters. The lack of serifs creates a more modern look to these typefaces. Because of the simpler lines, sans serif typefaces are most commonly used for large blocks of text on screens.

There are four main categories of sans serif typefaces:

Grotesque: these typefaces have minimal variation in stroke widths with uppercase letters that look mostly uniform. e.g. Franklin Gothic

Neo-Grotesque: these are simple fonts the emphasize legibility and contain fewer strokes than serif fonts. These have more refinement than grotesque typefaces. e.g. Arial

Geometric: A modern looking typeface where the letter shapes are influenced by geometric shapes. e.g. Futura

Humanist: Based on traditional letter forms that often alternate between thick and thin strokes. Characterized by loose letter spacing, wide counters and a large x-height, this makes humanist typefaces easy to read. e.g. Calibri

Display Fonts

Generally speaking, display fonts will be serif or sans serif. However, they warrant their own category as display fonts are designed for things like banners, advertisements and headers. They tend to be eye-catching and difficult to read in large blocks, but are usually full of character. e.g. Inspiration and Rubik Microbe

As can be seen from both of these examples, display fonts are highly variable and best reserved for title pages and chapter headings.