Which font for which balloon

A reader hears a page through its letters. The shape of the type says who is speaking, and how loudly, before a word is read. So each kind of text gets its own face, and you make that choice once per series, not once per balloon.

This page goes through the kinds in turn. For line breaks and sizes, see how to typeset a manga page.

Dialogue

Use a rounded comic lettering face, set in capitals. Comic capitals are open and even in height, so they stay readable at the small sizes a balloon forces and stack into a tidy block.

• Capitals throughout. Some comic faces carry a second set of capitals on the lowercase keys, drawn a little differently, so a doubled letter does not look stamped.
• Keep the “I” with crossbars for the pronoun. Use the plain stroke inside words.
• Avoid a face made for documents or screens. It reads as typed, not spoken.

Thoughts

Use the dialogue face, slanted, at the same size. The reader has no new shape to learn: the slant alone says the line is not spoken aloud.

• Give the slant one meaning. If it marks thoughts, mark stress with a heavier weight.
• Do not make thoughts smaller as well. One signal is enough.

Shouts

Use a heavy, condensed face in capitals. Weight makes the line loud before it is read, and narrow letters let it run large and still fit the balloon.

• Set it larger than dialogue, as far as the balloon allows.
• Do not scale the dialogue face up instead. Its strokes were drawn for small sizes and look thin when large.

Whispers and small asides

A whisper is the dialogue face set smaller, with more empty balloon around it. A muttered aside written beside a character, outside any balloon, suits a handwritten face in mixed case.

• Look at the page at the size it will be read. If the whisper cannot be read there, it is too small.

Sound effects

Use a display face, set large. A sound effect is part of the drawing, not of the script, so it follows the art: the size, angle and place of the original.

• Match the face to the sound. Thick, blocky letters for an impact, thin and scratchy ones for a small noise.
• Never set an effect in the dialogue face. It reads as someone saying the sound.

Captions and signs

Use a plain, squared face, upright. It tells the reader that this is not a voice: a place and time, a label, a shop front, a screen.

• Keep captions in one face for the whole series.
• A sign belongs to the object it is on. It may lean towards the look of the original, as long as it stays readable.

Narration

Use a calmer book face. It sets the storyteller apart from the cast. Narration boxes hold longer lines than balloons do, so mixed case works here where it would not in dialogue.

• Set it at the dialogue size or a little under, never over.
• One narrator, one face.

Translator’s notes

A note is your voice, not the story’s, so it should look like nothing else on the page: a plain face in mixed case, small, placed in the margin or the gutter and never in a balloon.

What to check before you pick a font

• It has every letter your language needs. Accented letters, the Turkish dotted İ and dotless ı, Polish and Vietnamese marks, Cyrillic. A face drawn for English may have none of them. Type a test line that uses them all before you commit.
• It stays readable small. Try it in your tightest balloon, at the width the page will be read at.
• It has a slanted cut, if your thoughts need one.
• Its license allows what you intend. A font you can download is not always a font you may use for every purpose. Read each font’s license.

Faces a letterer is likely to know by name include Wild Words and Anime Ace for dialogue, and Badaboom for sound effects. Run the same four checks on these as on any other.

Keep it the same across a series

Write the choices down once, as a style sheet for the series. One line per kind of text: the face, capitals or mixed case, the size next to dialogue, and any rule that goes with it. Add the special cases as they turn up: a character with a voice of their own, phone messages, a game’s menus.

Use the sheet for every chapter, and hand it to whoever letters the next one. A series that changes face halfway reads as two different books.

Common mistakes

• A face picked balloon by balloon, by taste, instead of by kind of text.
• A new set of faces every chapter, or with every new letterer.
• A face without your language’s letters, so an accented letter drops into another font in the middle of a word.
• Slant used for thoughts and for stress on the same page.
• Shouts made by enlarging the dialogue face.