Picking a Font for Your Children's Book

When picking a font for your children's book, the most important thing is that it's easy to read.

There might be some really cute whimsical fonts out there, and they might even be cute for the title of the book to be on the cover, but for the story, you need something very easy to read. For children's books, I try to stray away from choosing any kind of script / cursive font as well as any font that has only capital letters. I think it's also better to choose a font where the letters are drawn the same way that kids learn to draw letters - for example, where an "a" is made of a circle and a stick, and doesn't have an extra curve on the top - but I don't think that's a hard-and-fast rule. If you find a font that's perfect for your book and it does have a little extra flair, I think you can use your own discretion to decide whether it will work or not.

The next most important thing when choosing a font for your children's book, is that you choose a font for your children's book! In my opinion, it is very important to pick out a font that has some kind of personality and uniqueness to it, rather than just using one of the default fonts that you would normally find on a computer like Arial, Verdana, or Canva Sans.

When choosing a font, make sure you are looking at the style of illustrations you have in your children's book. If your illustrations are very rough as if they were drawn with a pencil, or painted with a brush, then a rough font might pair well with that. Whereas if your illustrations are very clean with smooth edges, then a smooth, clean font might look better.

I like to use the fonts that are available directly in Canva or Photoshop (depending on which program I'm using for the layout) as those fonts come with a commercial license so you don't have to worry about breaking any terms of use. Another great resource is Google Fonts - they have a ton of cute fonts for children's books. You can download any of their fonts and upload them to Canva, or if you're using Photoshop then you can install them directly on your computer.

Here is a PDF of my favorite children's book fonts that are available in Canva:

Fonts.pdf

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