Fonts & Art
Fonts & Art

Due to publishing constraints, I was unable to include the illustrations in the book that I wanted to. This page includes examples of fonts and how they can visually change the feel of your cookbook, as well as exactly I mean by clipart “families.”

The typeface, or font, and artwork you choose for your cookbook can help you establish a theme or an attitude (playful or formal). If done well, no one should really even notice how perfectly your art and font blends into the cookbook. Done poorly, and people will look at the pages and not quite know what’s wrong, but see that it’s just “off” somehow. For instance, cartoonish illustrations for a formal black-tie wedding theme would be inappropriate. A formal font like Edwardian Script (below) would look out of place in a cookbook intended for a collection of children’s favorite recipes.

Fonts
Fonts, or typefaces, are available in just about any style you can imagine. Many are free to download if you don’t already have what you want on your computer. While they can be a lot of fun to play with, it’s very important to use something that is readable. Serif fonts (like Times or New York) are considered to be the easiest to read, but sans-serif fonts like Arial or Helvetica are also quite readable. If you want to use something more decorative, consider using it for accents only, like in title chapters. The header above is a font called Brush Script, and it’s a particular favorite of mine, but completely unsuitable for paragraphs of text.


Please note that the names of these fonts are for Macintosh, which may
or may not be available for Windows, or be called the same thing.

Above are some examples of casual and formal fonts. The kind of font you choose will help set the tone of your cookbook. Using a formal font for a cookbook with a wedding theme would look terrific, and a casual font would be appropriate for a family reunion – depending on your family. I used Lucida Handwriting for my accent font, and Arial for the body. Incidentally, in the graphic above, the names of the various fonts are all the same point size, 24. That’s another thing to consider: some fonts are remarkably different in size even when you select the same size for all of them.

Art
If you’re planning on using art for a family cookbook, you can use scanned images of old recipe cards for clipart. Knowledge of a graphics program like Photoshop is helpful. Once you have the cookbook recipes entered and nearly ready to go, you might consider clip art. I’m not familiar with other word processing programs, but MS Word has an “insert art” command. I used royalty free clipart I found online for this, and tweaked them to suit my purposes in Photoshop. Alternately, you could enlist the aid of a family artist and scan their pictures for this. I chose smaller pictures that took up only about a third of a page as a chapter header. You could use larger pictures and separate each chapter with a full-size image.

The art you choose should be from a similar family, or it will be distracting. The examples below are from three different sets, or families, of (royalty free) clip art.

The top two are from the same design family, the bottom two are from two more families. Using all four pieces of clipart in a single document would be visually distracting, but most especially with the case of the full-color piece. One exception to this would be to use drawings from the children in your family. Those won’t all match, but they will still be of the same idea.

Photos make a wonderful addition to a family cookbook, as well. Whether it’s a picture of a kitchen full of cooks, or a portrait of a family member, it’s another way to make your cookbook special. Imagine the pleasure of someone a generation from now, leafing through your heirloom, and finding a recipe from their great-great-grandmother, as well as her picture... priceless!

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