Just realized vintage book covers are shaping my font choices...

I've been collecting old novels and the typography is so unique... Struggling to find modern equivalents that have the same feel. Any suggestions for similar fonts?

3 comments

3 Comments

christopher9433d ago

Saw a great article about this last week! It said to look for fonts with irregular letter spacing and slightly rough edges to get that hand-printed feel. Try searching for "Didot" or "Bodoni" for those classic serif styles, or "Futura" for a cleaner art deco look. Some digital foundries are making amazing revivals of old typewriter and display faces too.

fionabutler2d ago

Actually, my old design teacher always said Didot and Bodoni are too clean for that real hand-printed look. I'd look at something like Goudy Old Style instead for more of that imperfect feel, @christopher943. The digital revivals are a great tip though.

bell.felix2d ago

My friend Dan runs a small print shop in Milwaukee. He was trying to get that old letterpress look for a brewery label last month and said every clean digital font just looked wrong. He ended up finding this obscure Clarendon revival that had tiny, uneven ink traps, so the letters looked like they barely grabbed the paper. That was the trick, not the font style itself but those little flaws in the file.