Book cover design inspiration

The changing nature of book cover design

Donna Payne, Faber’s creative director, explains her creative process when designing a cover, and touches upon the impact of the pandemic and the boost in online sales it's prompted  The post The changing nature of book cover design appeared first on Creative Review.

The View From Cairo: how Helmi Eltouni’s al-Hilal book covers carved a modern Arab aesthetic

In his first column, Moe Elhossieny charts how the iconic Egyptian graphic designer, artist and calligrapher challenged Western-centric design ideals and created a visual legacy still influential today.

New Fictional Self-Help Titles Present Existential Messages on Faded Book Covers

Johan Deckmann (previously) presents existential notions of life, love, and self-doubt as self-help titles on hand-painted books. The fictionalized novels contain no words on their pages, however their size often directly correlates to the messages on the front covers, such as his series of blue books, which read “Good ideas” on the smallest, “Mediocre ideas” on the mid-sized work, and “Bad ideas,” on the largest. The Copenhagen-based artist is also a practicing psychotherapist who recognizes how language can be a powerful tool in both art and therapy.  More

The Messy Middle - Book Cover & Identity Design

A simple, bold and beautiful book cover design for Scott Belsky's new book 'The Messy Middle'.

A Skateboarder's Journal Book Cover Design Process

A Skateboarder's Journal Book Cover Design Process abduzeedoJun 04, 2019 As a former skateboarder and still avid fan of the sport I try to follow what's going on in that industry especially because, in my opinion, I believe they set a lot of trends in style. I have fond memories of the skateboarding magazines I used to collect in the 90s like Trasher and Transworld. When I saw the post that Tim Bisschop about a hand painted book cover for the "A Skateboarder's Journal" I knew I had to post about it. Tim was also super cool to share a bit of how he did that. It seems simple but the result is like the essence of skateboarding. It's all about the style and simplicity. Tim Bisschop is a graphic designer from Belgium wit an inspiring portfolio focused on Editorial Design, Graphic Design and Typography. We highly recommend that you check it out at http://www.timbisschop.be/ A Skateboarder's Journal Book Cover    

Alex Merto on his less is more approach to book cover design

Having designed book covers for around ten years, Merto says his process is driven fully by the book rather than his own personal style The post Alex Merto on his less is more approach to book cover design appeared first on Creative Review.

8 little-known book cover designs that should be classics

In the age of fickle online trends, font horoscopes, and tiny mics, what room is there to engage with the humble mass-market paperback of yesteryear? A new book, Second Hand, dusts off should-be-classic book covers that have largely been forgotten, and pulls out new design lessons from old tricks. Jesse Reed, the book’s author and cofounder of the design studio Order, compiled images of hundreds of secondhand modernist book covers and organized them according to publisher, year, and designer (some of which remain unknown or uncredited). Reed sourced the book covers himself and took the photos over the span of about a year and a half.[Photo: courtesy Vernacular]For Reed, Second Hand isn’t simply a nostalgic trip down memory lane. The unearthing of analog book covers offers an opportunity to give lesser known, but brilliantly executed, designs their due. He wanted to revisit the foundational rules of what some consider to be design canon.“A lot of these first edition paperbacks will be trashed. I find some kind of personal mission in saving them,” Reed says. Below, Reed chose eight lesser-known book cover designs that are exceptional.[Photo: courtesy Jason Reed]1. PRESENT PAST, PAST PRESENT, 1971“This is a stop-me-in-my-tracks book cover,” says Reed as we review the cover of a Ionesco memoir designed by Kuhlman Associates on his laptop. For Reed, this is because of the use of a single, easily interpretable symbol—the arrow—and overall simplicity of the design. “It’s pretty literal but also abstract: The past and the present moving in two different directions,” he explains. “It’s so obvious, but when you break down the two arrows going in different directions, there’s an art to it.”  With so few design elements, it’s also easier to notice very small design considerations, like the fact that the stroke of the arrow is the same as the x-height of the type. [Photo: courtesy Jason Reed]2. The MODELING OF MIND, 1963Many of the covers in Reed’s collection are esoteric, like this one on “computers and intelligence.” But that’s also what makes their simple covers so effective. Anyone browsing the stacks can get a general grasp of what the book’s about with a quick glance.“From a pure, formal design perspective, using a three column grid and one or two typefaces, it’s like quintessential foundations of typography and design,” Reed says of this cover by John and Mary Condon, a graphic design duo he believes has been overlooked. “There’s a very clear idea with the graphic imagery. The type is very structural. It’s not overcomplicating it or using any fancy effects or anything unnecessary. ” [Photo: courtesy Jason Reed]3. HOODED AMERICANISM, 1968This book on the history of the Ku Klux Klan uses a graphic sleight of hand to convey multiple meanings within a single graphic element: the letter A represents both a KKK hood and “Americanism.” The designer, Barbara McPenkow, “took the letterform from the title and turned it into the symbol that represents this group of people,” says Reed. “It’s literal but interpreted in a way that fits a really impactful book cover.”More broadly, the takeaway for contemporary designers—especially for those who subscribe to Swiss modernism—is to maintain an eagle eye for reduction. “All of these reduce ideas down to very simple messages. That’s what a book cover has to do because there’s an interpretation of the subject matter within a second.”[Photo: courtesy Jason Reed]4. STRANGER AND FRIEND, 1966This book cover, whose designer is unknown, utilizes a grid of identical, slightly rotated brown squares surrounding a single green square of the same size. The title echoes the colors. “I assume they’re representing people, and one individual person surrounded by other people, and that’s the metaphor,” Reed hypothesizes.
“Simplifying everything into the most simple.” [Photo: courtesy Jason Reed]5. DISTRIBUTION OF THE ELEMENTS IN OUR PLANET, 1965This book, published by McGraw Hill for its Earth and Planetary Science Series, is a far cry from the stock photo-filled McGraw Hill books of the early 2000s. Designer Rudolph de Harak depicted the idea with a simple globe covered by a repeating pattern of circles. It uses only one typeface and two colors.“McGraw Hill in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s is quintessential modernism. If you subscribe to this school of design, these things are the things that make my stomach turn in a good way. The abstraction of it,” explains Reed. “I’m so jealous that they did this, and it actually went to print.”[Photo: courtesy Jason Reed]6. THE HIDDEN DIMENSION, 1969This book cover, designed by George Giusti, is the first of Reed’s collection that combines illustration and graphic devices. It depicts a cube with a missing plane—the hidden dimension the title suggests. What makes this design effective is a quality that makes any design better, according to Reed: visual tension. In this case, there’s tension between the perfect geometry and the human form. “Tension is a good thing,” says Reed. “That’s what makes [a design] not one-note, so that there’s some dynamic and focal point. It simplifies it to the very core of what it needs to be.”[Photo: courtesy Jason Reed]7. PHOTOGRAPHY, 1972The exact topic of this book is unclear, but based on the cover photograph of an eye and the title, we can make a very obvious guess that it’s broadly about photography. (The designer is unknown.) “All of these [book covers] are so basic, but then the designers turn them into something interesting so that more people can figure it out for themselves,” says Reed. This book cover “turned a very obvious idea into something a little bit more striking and interesting.”In this case, the scale of the image is what gives the cover visual tension, according to Reed. “When you see this from across the store, that grabs you from 10 feet away. It’s very powerful in that sense.”[Photo: courtesy Jason Reed]8. THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS HERO, 1970“Immediate butterflies,” gushes Reed of this book cover by an unknown designer when it appears on screen. “There are a lot of anthropology books [in Second Hand]. I didn’t do this intentionally. Maybe books on anthropology have had very sick cover designs over the years.”One typeface, three colors. Scale and tension is also what makes this cover striking. “Common symbols [like an arrow] are also very striking and easily digestible forms for the general public,” says Reed. Referring to the large arrow on the cover that seems to represent the author’s mind, he adds, “Even if it doesn’t tell you what’s inside immediately, there’s a way in so you could understand this book just as much as anyone else.” [Image: courtesy Vernacular]SO WHAT MAKES A STANDOUT BOOK?One that shows a mastery of foundational design principles in a new or surprising way. All are “examples of what I think is good typography, space, scale, and hierarchy. If you were teaching a class on design fundamentals, a lot of these book covers would be good examples of interpretation.” Reed is aware of how his own design preferences influenced his selections, acknowledging that those principles aren’t necessarily a universal baseline. “These are very International Style, Swiss influenced,” he says, “which I think is good to challenge as ‘good’ design, which we know is not a truth.” The ideation behind the design concepts seems to be the most covetable, and most difficult to master. “A lot of these could be made in five minutes, but the thought process to get there and the ideation, and simplifying messages to this one space is very difficult to do,” explains Reed of the designs he included in his book. The book covers, which were all drawn by hand or hand typeset, are also “a reminder of craft,” he says, “and that just having Photoshop and Illustrator doesn’t make you an immediate designer.” For Reed, it seems the biggest thing for people just learning design should understand from this collection is the critical thinking behind each one. As the cliché goes, it’s hard to make something look easy. 

Jon Gray on designing book covers for Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney and other literary giants

If you were pushed to pick a selection of the most notable book covers of recent years, there’s a very good chance some of Jon Gray’s designs would be in there. From Sally Rooney’s critically acclaimed bestseller, Normal People, which adorned every bookshop window display late last year, to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, which seemed to make at least one appearance on every tube journey to and from home. Read more

ABUK: Book Covers Design for Audiobook Store

In the digital era and in terms of modern digital products, books are stepping up to the next level at the perspective of design. Today we offer you to review the project that shows a new approach to book cover design: check the creative designs of original book covers we created for ABUK, the first Ukrainian audiobook store. In fact, it's a full-cycle production of audiobooks in the Ukrainian language, with the original sound record and trendy intuitive design. That's the project in which the Tubik team did everything from scratch: branding, original book covers and illustrations, UI and UX design for iOS and Android as well as website design and development. Earlier we shared interface design details for this project, and here we welcome you to dive into the details of book cover design process with integration of 2D and 3D graphics.

Alex Merto combines wit and considered typography in his book cover designs

“I want my design to become an object that someone wants to hold onto for a very long time,” says the New York-based art director at Picador.