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Tag: devin washburn

The Trend Cycle

Alana Pockros talked to designers and others in the publishing community about trends in book cover design for the AIGA blog Eye on Design:

The guiding principle of like that book but different cover design has existed for decades. In the 1960s, the late book designer Paul Bacon pioneered the “Big Book Look,” which we might associate with Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint or Joan Didion’s The White Album: type-driven covers with large author names and ample negative space  that rely more on hue and font than imagery. Philip DiBello and Devin Washburn, founders of the design studio No Ideas, believe we’re currently seeing an evolution of the Big Book Look. “[There’s] a wave of similar covers that play with type intertwined with a key visual in a striking way,” they suggested. In The Look of the Book, Peter Mendelsund and David Alworth’s 2020 monograph, the authors call this mutative style “the interchangeable, big-type, colorful cover.” It’s a look Mendelsund and Alworth first noticed on the 2015 novel, Fates and Furies, and the style they see as the progenitor of the tired “it will work well as a thumbnail on Amazon” rationale. 

It is always interesting to hear designers talk about how they view the process and why we get certain trends. But the post itself, entitled “The Endless Life Cycle of Book Cover Trends”, is a variation on the well-worn, trend-focused ‘why do book covers look the same?’ article that has appeared in various guises over the years. Pokros herself references a New York Times article from 1974(!) that explains that jackets must be identifiable on television, and a Vulture piece from 2019 that postulates that book covers are now being designed for Amazon and Instagram. You could also read this post on Eye on Design from 2019 about the ubiquity of stock images, or this The New Yorker piece on design by committee from 2013, or this story in The Atlantic from 2012 (it’s e-readers fault!) among others.

It’s not that they’re necessarily wrong. There are clearly trends and tropes in book cover design as there are in any other kind of design (and pointing them out is fun — I do it frequently!). And there are lots of designs that aren’t great. That’s true of everything. It’s just that on the whole, book covers (like movie posters) don’t all look the same. Not really. Sure, books in the same genre frequently do. Covers sharing similar traits helps readers identify what kind of books they are buying. It doesn’t mean they are B-A-D. Perhaps part of what gets people so twitchy about high-profile literary fiction covers looking familiar is that they don’t like to think of certain kinds of literary fiction as genres?

I don’t know… I’m one of the marketing people whose fault this usually is.

I guess if you really want to get into it, trends in book covers often reflect trends in publishing itself. When similar books intended to appeal to similar readers are published by similar people at similar imprints that are part of similar, very large publishing conglomerates, maybe the issue isn’t really that they have similar covers?

Anyway TL: DR, if you’re seeing a lot of covers that look the same maybe it says more about the kind of books we are exposed to in our daily lives than about the range of covers that are actually out there?

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Book Covers of Note January 2016

Oof. Hello, January. This is all rather soon isn’t it? But here we are, a new month, and another selection of new book covers (with a few ‘old’ ones that I missed in the excitement at the end of 2015). Happy New Year…

Print
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders; design by Will Staehle (Tor Books / January 2016)

Bird design Kelly Winton
Bird by Noy Holland; design by Kelly Winton (Counterpoint / November 2015)

Blizzard design Devin Washburn
The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin; design by Devin Washburn (FSG / January 2016)

Childrens Home design Jaya Miceli; Art by Valerie Hegarty
The Children’s Home by Charles Lambert; design by Jaya Miceli (Scribner / January 2016)

Fine Fine design by Dan McKinley
Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams; design by Dan McKinley (McSweeney’s / January 2016)

A note from the book on the cover art:

“The art on this book’s cover is unsigned and was created for a romance novella published in Mexico City in the 1960s that appeared in serial form. This piece was produced using collage and gouache overpainting on illustration board, and the back reads “El Angel No. 64.” The printer of these covers held on to the originals for decades, and the entire collection was recently purchased from his warehouse. Works are available from the Pardee Collection Gallery of Iowa City, and ‘El Angel’ is provided courtesy of Diane Williams and Wolfgang Neumann.”

Gamelife design Alex Merto
Gamelife by Michael W. Clune; design by Alex Merto (FSG / September 2015)

Girl Through Glass design Jaya Miceli
Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson; design Jaya Miceli (Harper / January 2016)

goodonpaper-FINAL
Good on Paper by Rachel Cantor; design by Adly Elewa (Melville House / January 2016)

Ministry of Nostalgia design Andy Pressman
The Ministry of Nostalgia by Owen Hatherley; design by Andy Pressman (Verso / January 2016)

1956
1956: The World in Revolt by Simon Hall; design by Alex Kirby (Faber & Faber / Janaury 2016)

A nice US / UK compare and contrast for The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie:

Portable Veblen design Jo Walker
Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie; design by Jo Walker (Fourth Estate / January 2016)

Portable Veblen design Oliver Munday
Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie; design by Oliver Munday (Penguin Press / January 2016)

Prose Factory design James Paul Jones
The Prose Factory by D. J. Taylor; design by James Paul Jones (Chatto & Windus / January 2016)

snow queen sanna annukka
The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by Sanna Annukka; cover art by Sanna Annukka (Hutchinson / October 2015)

This looks absolutely beautiful, but I’ve seen very little about it online, much less seen it in person. Apparently Sanna Annukka has also illustrated an edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Fir Tree. It looks wonderful too.

Splitfoot design by Nico Taylor
Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt; design by Nico Taylor (Corsair / January 2016)

Stargazers Sister design Oliver Munday
The Stargazer’s Sister by Carrie Brown; design by Oliver Munday (Pantheon / January 2016)

stones of muncaster cathedral design MS Corley
The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral by Robert Westall; design by M.S. Corley (Valancourt Books / December 2015)

13-8 design Shepherd Studio
13.8 by John Gribbin; design by Shepherd Studio (Icon / October 2015)

This Is The Ritual design Greg Heinimann
This is the Ritual by Rob Doyle; design by Greg Heinimann (Bloomsbury / January 2016)

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Book Covers of Note November 2014

This is the last of the monthly cover round-ups for 2014, and I have a lot to cram in before I start on my big end of year list, so it’s a bit of corker (if I do say so myself) with lots of gold foil and other fancy finishes:

Amnesia
Amnesia by Peter Carey; design by Alex Kirby (Faber & Faber / October 2014)

(The dust jacket is actually acetate)

betrayers
The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis; illustration by Matt Taylor; type design and art direction by Richard Bravery (Viking / August 2014)

9780374166670
The Big Green Tent by Ludmila Ulitskaya; design by Devin Washburn (FSG / December 2014)

convulsing-bodies-anne-jordan
Convulsing Bodies by Mark D. Jordan; design by Anne Jordan (Stanford University Press / October 2014)

Critical_Journeys
Critical Journeys by Robert Schroeder; design Jana Vukovic (Library Juice Press / September 2014)

dear-reader
Dear Reader by Paul Fournel; illustration by Jean Jullien (Pushkin Press / November 2014)

9780871409287
The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings; design by Devin Washburn (Liveright / October 2014)

Fiddler-on-the-Roof-Cover
Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein; design Christopher Silas Neal (Crown / September 2014)

forgive me leonard peacock
Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick; design by Gray318 (Little Brown & Co / July 2014)

girl-defective
Girl Defective by Simmone Howell; design by Debra Sfetsios-Conover; illustration Jeffrey Everett (Atheneum / September 2014)

(I also really like Sandy Cull’s design for the Australian edition published by Pan Macmillan in 2013)

9780226171715
The Hoarders by Scott Herring; design by David Drummond (University of Chicago Press / November 2014)

9781940450261
In Case of Emergency by Courtney Moreno; design by Sunra Thompson (McSweeney’s / September 2014)

Wint_9780385677851_jkt_all_r6.indd
Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter; design by Scott Richardson (Doubleday Canada / November 2014)

its-not-me
It’s Not Me It’s You by Mhairi McFarlane; design by Heike Schüssler; illustration by Gianmarco Magnani / Silence Television (HarperCollins / November 2014)

little-failure-pb
Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart; design by Rodrigo Corral Design (Random House / October 2014)

9781554471416_a
Smoke Proofs by Andrew Steeves; design by Andrew Steeves (Gaspereau Press / September 2014)

9780141394664
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Penguin / November 2014)

rabbit
The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen; design by Nathan Burton (Pushkin Press / September 2014)

(The hardcover edition, designed by David Pearson, is also amazing)

sailing-the-forest-9781447274049
Sailing the Forest by Robin Robertson; design by Neil Lang (Picador / September 2014)

(The skull is gold foil on the finished book)

sense-of-style
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker; design by Louise Fili; illustration by R. O. Blechman (Viking / September 2014)

9781846145506
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker; design by Jim Stoddart & Isabelle de Cat; photograph by Kayla Varley (Penguin / September 2014)

9780141395036
Tales of the Marvellous and the Strange translated by Malcolm C. Lyons; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith Isabelle de Cat; illustration by Nina Chakrabarti (Penguin / November 2014)

(Just look at all that gold!)

9780374533861
Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter; design by Charlotte Strick; photograph by Natalie Dirks (FSG / November 2014)

0889713065
What I Want to Tell You Goes Like This by Matt Rader; design by Ben Didier / Pretty/Ugly Design (Nightwood Editions / October 2014 )

you
You by Caroline Kepnes; design by Natalie Sousa (Atria / September 2014)

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