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Cover design
posted by Emma on 22 Sep 2007
I've just read a rubbish book on cover design. The author of Designing Books: Practice and Theory is obsessed with the, apparantly raging, argument that exists between designers who favour symmetry in their design, and those who inisist on asymmetry. Ironically his captions are almost impossible to decipher or figure out which image they relate to. His use of language is clunktastic ("Disputatious all his life, [Tschichold] found himself proclaiming much that was exactly opposite to what he held to be correct in 1928.") Disputatious? Lawks. Sadly, the examples that he gave throughout the book - in much the same way as the examples of cover design I saw a few months back at a lecture on book design at the RSA - were to my eye jarring, poorly formed, laboured and often archaic-looking.
Maybe I'm insufficiently educated. Maybe I have terrible judgement. Perhaps. But instead, here are a few of my views on cover design.
1) The cover has to position the book in its genre.
Easy, really, to check if you've got this one right. Take a copy of your book cover into store, go to the relevant shelf and see if it fits. Does it stand out? If it does, it's probably wrong. The blurb and the cover and the writing is unique, but the only way the reader will discover it is if the packaging explains, at a subconscious level, what the words are about. You wouldn't expect to open a cornflakes pack and find pasta, would you? Same deal.
2) The elements of the cover have to blend.
Often the font of the title can look plonked. Make sure that the layout of the words, like on these fine books, is integrated with the image.
3) Observe genre conventions.
A bit like #1, but here are some rules of thumb:
- Crime has a 'destroy' type font (see Death Artist and the Kathryn Fox, above)
- Zombie / werewolf / vampire horror has a layer or two of distressing:
- Commercial fiction aimed at women has a handwritten font
Of course all these rules are to be broken at will - but they are excellent starting points in a cover design project. I'll add to these 'rules' as I think of them! Right now I have to go to prepare for the Gardners trade show tomorrow. See you there if you're going!
Comments: 3
Notable that the cover of the cover design book is bland, not easy for the eye/trained consumerist mind to decipher quickly, and of a very unpleasant color.
When all this cover design conversation was swirling around, I forgot a question I meant to ask a publisher sooner or later. What's up with commercial fiction starting to have bloody taglines on the cover? That smacks of the worst kind of commercialism to me, the kind that sums up a worthwhile life experience in a 30-second jingle or that uses gooey images of children learning to fish with their grandpas in order to sell mutual funds. A book is a commodity of the soul, and with a tagline it starts to look like a commodity of the dollar (pound) far more nakedly than I'd like.
I can only hope that you don't know what I'm talking about because this execrable trend has not yet moved across the pond. Or am I wrong? Is this a better way to move books into the hands of people who wouldn't ordinarily read?
Posted by: KatharineC | September 23, 2007 11:32 PM
Emma
Whilst I understand your reasoning that a cover design should instantly tell you the genre of the book, surely once you have met that criteria you still want your book to stand out from the rest of that genre on the shelf?
Matthew
Posted by: Matthew | September 24, 2007 09:42 AM
Unfortunately, most books end up stocked with spines facing out... thus robbing the designer of their work.
But, if you want to discover an artist who creates such superb covers then look for Vincent Chong: he's young, new, and unbelieveably good.
Posted by: Christopher Teague | September 24, 2007 02:20 PM