It's a good start, but there are some critical things I want to adjust - mainly kerning.
Kerning is the spacing between two individual letters, or letter pairs. Most professional fonts are built with decent kerning, but even if you were laying out text in a single word (say, a logo), you'll still most likely need to adjust the kerning in at least one place.
Look at the layout above and focus on the space between each letter. Do you see any areas of concern?
Here's what I see: The kerning between most of the letters is fine. The kerning between a couple letter pairs, like B/L and M/O and O/K looks too loose - it's too far apart. And the kerning between the L and the A is too close.
You might think that kerning doesn't seem that important - and if you're not a designer, you probably haven't heard the term. It may seem minor, but it's critical to making text look professional because even though most people aren't aware of the term or the concept, they still notice when it's off - and on a subconscious level they'll think, "Something looks off..." and they won't view your work with the same value that they would if the layout were handled better. So let's adjust that kerning.
What we're going to do is optical kerning - just making the corrections by eye. There are some loose "rules" for this, but if you just learn what looks good and what doesn't, you'll know how to get good results.
With your Text tool selected (the big black A in the Toolbox), click in your text box between the two letters that need adjusting.
On a PC, you'll hold down Alt and hit the Left Arrow (to move two letters closer together) and the Right Arrow (to move them apart). On a PC, it's Option instead of Alt. I'm going to move the B and L closer together to tighten the kerning, so I hit Option-Left Arrow a few times (I'm on a Mac).
The adjustment amount in GIMP is small, so it took me nine keypresses to get the B and L as close as I wanted them, using the other letter spaces (the ones I like, anyway) as a guide:
This process almost always requires going back and forth, so get things where you think you want them, move onto the next letter pair, and go back later if you need to make more adjustments.
Next, I tighten M and O:
And O and K:
And then I loosen up the space between the L and A - they're almost touching above:
It looks better, but I see a few more letter pairs that look like they need tightening - like S and M, A and C, C and K - and R and O and O and K from "BROKEN". I also tightened up both spaces in "THE" and even tightened the space between the words "BY" and "THE":
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| kerned title |
And just for comparison, here's where I started:
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| original, unkerned title |
Look how disjointed the original looks now. The text holds together much better in the adjusted version. It looks unified. If you plan to design your own book covers or even design them for other authors, train yourself to notice kerning. It really matters.
Now I'll finally add my faux-pen name, the randomly selected Joyann Michaelsen. A third typeface could work, but I'm going to play it safe and stick with Brothers Bold, the typeface used for "BROKEN" and "BLACK SMOKE".
As mentioned in the previous step, I duplicate the Black Smoke layer, then drag it to the bottom of my layout. I type the author name in all caps after the E in "SMOKE" (or I'll lose the text formatting - fix this issue, GIMP - please!) and Select All (Control- or Command-A) and because the author name won't fit, I make the text size 120 pixels in the box above it:
I didn't center the book title text - I don't think that would look good without adjusting the size of the words, which I don't want to do in this case - but I do want the author name centered. So I Select All again and click the Center icon from the (gulp) "Justify" menu on the bottom Text menu of the Toolbox:
Why "gulp"? Because that setting shouldn't be named "Justify" - it should be "Align" or "Alignment". Justified text really, originally (because the term has been so abused by bad software) meant that the text stretched across its text box so that both the left and right sides were even going down. "Justified Left" text is really "Left-Aligned" text. I can't let that one slip by. I'll also throw this in - a better icon layout for "Justify" would have been the standard Left, Centered, Right, and Justified in that order. And now I see that they call Justified "Filled"? Looks like I'll be writing some letters soon...
So I center my text - and I need to center the whole text field (check the box outline - there's a little more space from the left edge than there is from the right) so I click on the Align tool (mentioned in an earlier step), click on the text box, then click the Align Center icon in the top center:
Looking pretty good, though now, seeing how small the author name has to be, the excess space on the bottom black area is bothering me. I decide to stack the text, making "JOYANN" larger to match the width of "MICHAELSEN". I'm going to forego all the steps, since everything has been mentioned. I kern the author name as well, and adjust the Line Spacing (a setting near the bottom of the Text Tool options) and get this:
Looking a little lonely down there, author name - but that's okay because the name itself, small as it may be, looks like a solid block of text.
I select the Scale tool (mentioned in a previous step - make sure the Width and Height are linked) and enlarge (I had to recenter the text box, too). It takes a few tries to get it the way I want it - bigger, but not ridiculously huge. Here's what I got:
That author name looks well-placed in its black field now - but the title now looks small by comparison, and the whole layout looks bottom-heavy. Hmm... should I rethink the stacking of the author name? Modify the layout? Switch the author name and title? Work on the title treatment, possibly adding other elements? And should some of the text be colored?
This step has been long enough, so I'll save those kind of adjustments for Step 9 - Balancing the Layout.
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