Font of all knowledge.........

Despite the sun shining fit to bust all day today, I have been hard at work indoors.

Two casting sessions, stocktaking check and several hours productive work on my book, which is finally, after several months of faffing about, beginning to take shape. I'm still a few years away from retirement but I've had in mind to put my quarter of a century worth of experience in the miniature world to good use and pen a series of instructive manuals on various different topics.

It's much, much harder than I thought it would be. All the knowledge of how to do stuff is in my head, and I've had years of practice at writing easy to understand instructions and can make a reasonable fist of the macro photography, but those aren't the problem.

Every time I try to plan the layout and design I end up with a mish-mash of different styles and formats, none of which are quite what I'm aiming for.

The whole thing would be a lot easier if I actually KNEW what I was aiming for but I'm hoping I will stumble across the perfect layout by accident.

And don't even get me started on fonts.

I now know more about fonts than can be good for anyone who is not a professional font designer or typographer. For example, who would have thought there could be a font called Girls are Weird..........?

In the process of my font research I've come to realise that I'm very font sensitive.....I get all nervy and jangly if I read something which is in a completely inappropriate font. Fonts are something we take for granted and if they're doing their job right, we're hardly even aware of them, at least in normal body text.

However selecting an appropriate font for a project is a nightmare. I don't want anything too formal, but also I don't want it too look like a nursery school reading book. It's got to be easy on the eye as there will be a lot of textual information, but I also want it to stand out from the crowd. Also I'll probably have different fonts in headings and text boxes and they all have to look kind of unified and not fight with each other visually.

Initially I'd been thinking along the lines of something in a plain cursive script but having tried out various fonts on a piece of text, that would be way too much hard work to read. I think I want san serif with no twiddly bits but I keep getting distracted by the zillions of fonts available on the internet.

I've trawled through the Top 10 Fonts lists of dozens of design 'experts' and I'm not even close to that eureka moment of discovering my perfect typeface.

If anyone in the blogosphere has a favourite, do feel free to leave a comment and I'll check it out.

Anyway, after I'd done some desultory font-finding, I changed tack and did some research on pleating, which is not in itself a particularly fascinating subject. However as a result I found this little gem of a blog which I'll flag up as this week's 'featured artisan'.