Gallery of knockout book covers: Lessons for E?
So what do you think of Gregg Kulick’s Brave New World cover and the other items in Smashing Magazine’s collection of excellent book covers and paperbacks?
Which are your favorites? Your not-so-favorites? Why?
And what are the lessons for designers of e-book covers? How should they be special, beyond the obvious issue of their being comfortable to view at a smaller size? Excerpt:
“An effective book cover manages to catch human’s eye and convey the idea behind the book on one single page. However, it’s getting even harder: to make a book really hard to forget, designers need to design the cover in a unique, creative and striking way. That’s not that different from Web where it’s important to build a sound information architecture upon a rather restricted design layout.”
Another question: How much does the look of a cover influence whether you’ll buy an e-book? A p-book? Which publishers have the best e-covers? The best p-covers? At any rate, as I see it, a lot of people do think they can tell a book by its cover. What’s more, even a good cover can hurt if it clashes with the mood inside.
Related: The Book Cover Archives.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:48 am
The gallery serves as a reminder to me of how a book cover can be graphically descriptive of the book, even clever and eye-catching, and still very unattractive! I’d put many of the books in the gallery in that category, but that’s just my taste. (I also love a good Doc Savage novel cover… so there you go.)
It’s so hard to distinguish a book cover these days… even if the novel is unique, it may be very difficult to find unique images to convey that. But no matter how unique, if the cover composition is downright annoying, I’m less likely to buy the book.