in Design
How the chapters of Dreamscape Code open
A hairline numeral, a light title across its foot, and an initial that drops exactly three lines.
The first page of a chapter is the one place in a novel where the design is allowed to speak. For Dreamscape Code each chapter opens the same way: a tall hairline numeral set in Anton, with the chapter title in Cormorant Garamond Light running across its foot, then the chapter's sign.
Two faces doing different jobs
Anton is a heavy condensed display face, close in spirit to the lettering on the cover. Drawn as a hairline outline rather than a solid, it keeps the cover's scale without its weight. Cormorant Garamond Light is a delicate old-style face, and set across the numeral it gives the page something to read rather than just something to look at.
Body text is set in Sabon, a text face designed to be read for hours without being noticed. The display faces appear only where the book changes gear.
Initials that fit the lines
The first paragraph of each chapter begins with an initial that drops exactly three lines. Getting that exactly right is fiddlier than it sounds: the top of the initial has to align with the cap height of the first line, and its foot with the baseline of the third. Chapters whose first paragraph is only a single line take a raised initial instead, sitting on the baseline and rising above it, because a three-line drop would hang into empty space.
The same in every edition
The ebook echoes the print design: the same hairline numeral with the title across its foot, the same three-line initials. Readers differ in how they handle initials, so the ebook is tuned to the book's line spacing, and it asks Apple Books to use the book's own fonts so that Cormorant and Anton appear there too.