After three years of tweaking, I finally dropped off the files for my new book, The Moon Princess, at the printer today. One of the last design challenges was creating a drop cap for the opening word, Long. The white space at the L's right edge broke the flow.
Googling around for ideas, I found this vintage screencast by O’Reilly author Deke McClelland. He demonstrates several ways of bulking up an L in InDesign. First, there's the standard three-line drop cap:
Then, he drop-title-capitalizes the whole first word:
Finally, he settles on drop-capping every letter in the word:
None of those approaches looked right on my text, because the first paragraph was only two lines long. My solution was to "lift-cap" the L by doubling its size and making it bold. That put the horizontal part of the character on the same baseline as the rest of the word, leading the eye into the phrase. To enhance the connection, I emboldened the rest of the phrase as well:
I could have experimented with a different font for the L; I also considered putting it in a black box and reversing the color. But in the end, I thought this approach looked cleanest.
How have you dealt with the drop cap from L?
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Design
Comments (1)
Read More Entries by David Battino.
The Elements of Typographic Style has a good example on p64 of how to deal with the large gap created, as in the first image. Simply shift the top line closer to the L, so it's around an en space away from the stem, while keeping the lower lines an en away from the L's bounding box. (In the EoTS example the first line is capitalised, too.) There are differing schools of thought, but with letters like A and L, where there's a large gap before the rest of the word, tracking closer to the letter's shape works well.
Another way to get around this problem is to use decorated drop-caps that are all square in shape. Cheating, I know!
P.S. Asking this question over at Typophile ( http://typophile.com/forum ) might be a good idea, many of the world's best typographers hang out there.