Style combination · Pairs well

Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover × Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

Borrow its brush and pointed-pen scripts for the title, as The Kiss Quotient and The Wedding Date did, to tip a cover toward sweetness and the wedding plot; pair the script with block capitals to keep it readable small.

From the research on Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover (Cartoon Couple Cover)

Mix them and make something Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover, their arrangement from Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover, the finish from Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover (Cartoon Couple Cover) Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

Type from Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering: Script
Hand-lettering
Colour from Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover: Flat fields
Full polychrome
Form from Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover: Stylised figuration
Restrained accents
Composition from Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover: Isolated object
Full bleed
Surface from Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering: Painterly brushwork
Paper & letterpress bite

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

Rose

Kaushan Script, standing in for Brush-pen script (brush lettering): thick downstrokes and thin upstrokes from felt-tip brush pens, brushes and paint pens, often in watercolour

Text · Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover

The illustrated cover of the contemporary romantic comedy: a couple drawn as flat cartoon figures with simplified faces, from silhouettes and hidden faces to a few cartoon features, caught in one gesture that states the premise, on a single saturated ground of teal, pink, yellow or purple, under a hand-lettered title so large that the figures often lean on it. It recalls the drawn covers of 2000s chick lit. William Morrow's The Hating Game (2016) was an early example and Berkley took it up wholesale in 2018; by 2023, 72% of the romances featured in Publishers Weekly had illustrated covers.

Schibsted Grotesk; Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover used Tall, condensed hand-drawn capitals in white, stacked in two to four lines down the cover and Brush or monoline script for the title or the author's name

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover, with a counter-accent from Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover (Cartoon Couple Cover) Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

#024c8b ground · 36%
#ffffff ink · 14%
#fdc104 accent · 18%
#c6a45a accent · 14%
#ef3e84 accent · 10%
#e8c5bd accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #024c8b;
  --ink: #ffffff;
  --accent-1: #fdc104;
  --accent-2: #c6a45a;
  --accent-3: #ef3e84;
  --accent-4: #e8c5bd;
  --font-display: "Kaushan Script", cursive;
  --font-text: "Schibsted Grotesk", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover (Cartoon Couple Cover): Draw the characters as the book describes them, in skin tone, body size, age, disability and gender, and do not lighten or slim them for the market: illustration spread partly because stock photography offered too few people of colour, and Helen Hoang chose it to get past readers' bias about her Asian lead. Because a cute cartoon cover does not show how explicit a book is and can be mistaken for young-adult fiction, say clearly on the book and in its retail listing that it is an adult romance. Critics have read the uniform look as sexist, making women's adult reading look like YA (Kelly Jensen, Book Riot, 2019), so draw this book's own premise rather than the template.

Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering: Modern calligraphy is a living trade of freelance calligraphers who sell wedding commissions, workshops and scanned alphabets: commission or license a hand instead of tracing a calligrapher's published names, quotes or practice sheets, and never present a generated hand as the work of a named letterer. Image models write pseudo-script with missing, doubled or garbled letters, so have every word written by hand or checked letter by letter before it goes on an invitation or a sign.