Fonts and Speech Bubbles

When choosing a font, I decided that using any old standard font such as helvetica or arial would detract from the rest of the book's design. 

Although I'd originally thrown around the idea of making a font out of my own handwriting, it didn't feel like it matched the tone and I ended up going through DaFont's font database to find one that better fit the comic. To avoid copyright issues, I made sure that the fonts I used were 100% free to use, rather than free for personal use only or under a licence. 

I narrowed it down to three fonts:

C J Potter (top), The TOADFROG (middle), and Kill Dill (bottom).

In the end, I picked The TOADFROG. I liked the wonky-hand drawn feel with the addition of the chunkier capital letters. 

While the illustrations themselves remained primarily black and white, I added colour in with my speech bubbles, which shifted in hue to match the narrative mood. Additionally, rather than using a uniform speech bubble template, I tried to keep my speech bubbles dynamic and varied, often becoming part of the illustration and weaving in and out of the characters. I wanted the way the dialogue was shown to feel just as much a part of the comic as the pictures, another way to aid in storytelling.