The lettering on romance covers dances with bouncy baselines, flirts with right alignment, and tantalizes with enjambment-style line breaks; all faux pas under the academic standards of design, but powerful at eliciting an emotional response. Type is often large-scale and boldly colored, calling out to be touched. But this emphasis on typography shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, letters serve a not dissimilar purpose to both graphic designers and writers—like clay to a sculptor, they’re the raw material waiting to be molded into art.
