I hope you’re staying healthy and optimistic about the new year. As this is the post about new 2024 covers, it inevitably includes a few from 2023 that I missed at the time. There are also a couple of indie covers, one from a university press, and, continuing a theme from last year, one from a Canadian publisher. Keep warm, friends.
Filterworld by Kyle Chayka; design by Oliver Munday (Doubleday / January 2024)
I mentioned Kyle Chayka in the introduction to my post looking back at 2023. I didn’t realize that he had book coming out. I guess I will have to read it now!
Font wizards correct me if I am wrong, but I *think* both of these covers use Manofa from Inhouse Type? (And I think saw it on the cover of a forthcoming book too recently. Maybe a typeface inspired by Lydian is becoming the new Lydian?)
Happy New Year! I hope you’re safe and well. As is now the tradition, the first post of the year is a look back at some of the young adult covers of last year. The usual caveats apply of course. Not much YA crosses my desk at work, which is mostly indie publishing, and it is not a category I follow closely apart from what my kids are reading, so my insight here is limited. Still, I think at some of the stuff I wrote about the industry in my 2023 post on adult covers probably holds true for YA too. The toll of the past few years has led to a certain amount of risk aversion from both publishers and designers (albeit for different reasons), and my sense is that folks are bracing for more of the same in 2024. I would guess that genre expectations within the broader YA category have limited the room for experimentation too. Some things need to look the same it seems. But even if there is some conservatism in the current design approaches (if it ain’t broke…), and things in general feel pretty grim, there is a remarkable amount of diversity and representation on the covers of YA books — and perhaps even among the designers and illustrators themselves — and that feels like something that should be celebrated. I’ve tried my best to get all the credits for the covers, but please let me know if I missed anyone out — I’ll be happy to update the post where necessary.
Her Radiant Curse by Elizabeth Lim; art direction by Angela Carlino; art by Tran Nguyen; lettering by Alix Northrup (Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers / August 2023)
Tran Nguyen and Alix Northrup also worked on the covers for Elizabeth Lim’s previous books Six Crimson Cranesand The Dragon’s Promise, which appeared on the 2021 and 2022 lists respectively.
The Twenty-One by Elizabeth Rusch; design by Paul Zakris; illustration by Will Staehle (Greenwillow Books / September 2023)
The Voice Upstairs by Laura E. Weymouth; design by Debra Sfetsios-Conover; illustration by Marcela Bolivar (Margaret K. McElderry Books / October 2023)
I hope you’re safe and well wherever you are. What do we have this month? A few British covers for a change, a bit of Canadian content, a couple of indie presses, and even something from a university press, not to mention covers from all the usual suspects. Enjoy!
Anam by André Dao; design by Tiana Dunlop (Pan Macmillan / August 2023)
I like the cover of the US edition of Bridge published by Mulholland Books too. Let me know if you know who designed it and I’ll add in the credit! It was designed by Kirin Diemont.
Jonny also re-designed the previous books in this series to match. They’re a lovely set that somehow feel very British, and very Faber. They sort of remind me of postwar pub signs and vintage lettering on canal barges. Anyway, I like them a lot.
Even though it’s still just about July — a supposedly “quiet” month in publishing — I’m running late once again. Hopefully everyone is on vacation and won’t notice that it’s basically August already and I am here sliding in under the wire. There are some great covers this month though. A bit of collage, some really nice typography, and lots of pink and red. Enjoy!
The Absolutes by Molly Dektar; design by Yeon Kim (Mariner / July 2023)
I like this cover a lot, but I’m shamelessly stealing it from Lit Hub’s most recent book cover round-up (a benefit of being last to post!), so I hope the design credit is correct because I couldn’t verify it before posting!
I had this noted as down as July cover, but the book was actually released in June. The cover of the Two Lines Press edition of Running Through Beijing by Xu Zechen has also been re-designed to match.
This reminded me of the 2017 cover of Smoke by Dan Vyleta designed by Mark Abrams with an illustration by the late Colombian artist Alejandro García Restrepo who passed away last month.
I hope you’re keeping safe and well. There’s quite a nice mix of covers this month (I think?). There’s some fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Some paperbacks and some hardcovers. Inevitably there are books from the big folks in NYC, but there’s also some indie titles, and a couple of covers from the UK. There is even some Canadian content for those of you who care about that sort of thing.1
This is the third Rodrigo Corral cover for New Direction’s editions of Dazai. I’m curious — can anyone can tell me the typeface? UPDATE: it’s not a typeface, it’s lettering! Thanks to Erik at New Directions for letting me know (and for sending the final cover)!
Oh and if you’re curious about the enduring popularity of Dazai (who died in 1948), Andrew Martin wrote a piece about it for the the New York Times.
Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan; design by Beth Steidle (Tin House / March 2023)
If one of the fine folks at Tin House would like to send me a higher quality image, I’ll be glad to add it in! Thanks to the fine folks at Tin House for sending over the cover!
Voyager by Nona Fernández; design by Kapo Ng (Graywolf Press / February 2023)
Sam by Allegra Goodman; design by Donna Cheng; photograph by Mariam Sitchinava (Dial Press / January 2023)
I’m not sure exactly why, but I just assumed this was a UK cover when I first saw it (despite it literally having “New York Times Bestselling Author” in all-caps at the top!).
Sing, Nightingale by Marie Hélène Poitras; translated by Rhonda Mullins ; design by Ingrid Paulson (Coach House / February 2023)
For some reason this makes me think of the ‘weird nature’ (including animals with human eyes!) in Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, which is still one of my favourite novels of the last 10 years…
True Life by Adam Zagajewski; design by Jeff Clark (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / February 2023)
I also saw Pete Garceau’s cover for School House Burning by Derek W. Black recently, which snuck past me when it was published by PublicAffairs in September 2020 but still seems terribly au courant…
Wolfish by Erica Berry; design by Keith Hayes; illustration by Rokas Aleliunas (Flatiron / February 2023)
I should, at this point, rename this post “Young Adult Book Covers I Saw Last Year, Quite Liked, and Could Find Some Credits For.” It would be accurate.
December turned out to be really busy. It is every year. I’m not sure why it still catches me out. That said, 2022 did seem to be especially busy for reasons far, far too boring to get into here (yes, I got sick amongst other things).
I had thought, in fact, that it might be time to retire this particular annual post. But then I looked around to see what other YA cover lists had been posted and… well, it wasn’t great. If I don’t do it, who will?
This year’s list — like last year’s — is full of illustrated covers. It seems to be the dominant trend, and I would really like someone more knowledgeable than me to profile some of the illustrators and put their work in its proper context. Maybe there is an art book in it for an enterprising publisher, if there isn’t one already? There are so many great covers from the past couple of years to choose from. 1
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this very late look at some of the YA covers of 2022. Feel free to leave your thoughts below.
“Cover design in the US went from being house-styled, design driven and idiosyncratic (think Grove Press or New Directions or whatever Push Pin was up to) to the ‘big book look’ of the 1970s defined by designers like Paul Bacon. Make the type as large as possible, centre it, and combine with some non-specific imagery. That look still defines what we see on the bestseller list to this day. It established a generic way for covers to look and a familiar shorthand for sales teams and booksellers to understand – ‘aah, this must be a … big book!’. It ignored design principles of layout, composition and conceptual thinking that had been codified over the previous 50 years in favour of a commercial literal-ness. It also took away a lot of the fun.”
Jamie Keenan’s review of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s naughty cover for The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie is also a good time.
2022. Twenty twenty-two. Two thousand and twenty-two… “Where did it go?” Or, sobbing, “ are we done yet?” It feels like both. It’s been a year that’s simultaneously dragged on interminably and disappeared in a cognitive blur.
I’m glad other people have already written about it.
At Creative Review, writer and editor Mark Sinclair picked his favourite covers of 2022 and reflected on industry trends in the UK, including the Design Publishing & Inclusivity mentorship program for under-represented creatives launched this year by Ebyan Egal, Donna Payne, and Steve Panton.
Literary Hub posted the best covers of the year as chosen by 31 designers. With a comprehensive 103 covers on the list, it tacitly poses the annual question “what do I have left to add to this conversation?” LitHub have been posting these lists for seven years apparently. I am an ancient desiccated husk.
Fast Company and the Washington Post asked slightly smaller groups of designers to write about their favourites covers.
Designer and art director Matt Dorfman chose the best book covers of 2022 for the New York Times, and empathized with the plight of the designers:
Most often, any personal stylistic expressions in their work are swallowed up in service to the multiple masters — editors, marketing directors, sales teams — who sign off on a book’s cover. There is also the matter of adhering to any one publisher’s dos and don’ts, which can inform mandates about typography, color palettes and production flourishes like embossing or metallic inks. For people employed in a theoretically creative pursuit, designers’ talents are often defined by how effortlessly they can make themselves disappear to serve the book.
Matt Dorfman, New York Times
No one captured the prevailing mood better than this Tom Gauld cartoon. A reminder, if one were needed, that nobody knows anything.
Earlier in the year, Australian reporter Rafqa Touma called out the trend of ‘well dressed and distressed’ young women on covers. As designer Mietta Yans notes, the covers often reflect their books’ stylish and sad protagonists, so I’m not sure this one is on the art departments.
Some of the trends I’ve talked about before spilled over into 2022. Collage, painting (contemporary, and historical — often tightly cropped), big skies, landscapes and seascapes, black and white photography (not just for LGBTQ+ trauma!), retro-ness, idiosyncratic display typefaces. Orange. Pink was in vogue too. The Instagram-ish combination of both pink and orange (sometimes with deep purple-ish blues too) seemed to be very much a thing this year. I suspect this is what happens when you ask designers to make things “pop” one too many times.
It is hard to know if these are genuine trends, or if it is just the stuff I notice. I’m sure there are things going on with commercial covers that I don’t pay enough attention to (although I will not be sad to see the popularity of that flat illustration style — the one that Slate pointed out in TWO THOUSAND AND FIFTEEN! — eventually fade away). I certainly don’t get the sense that everything looks the same, which is often the criticism. There is still room for a little weirdness and that can only be a good thing…
Ghost Music by An Yu; design Suzanne Dean (Harvill Secker / November 2022)Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes; design by Suzanne Dean (Jonathan Cape / April 2022)
The Julian Barnes cover also came in blue, and under the die-cut jacket is a beautiful photo from René Groebli’s photoessay The Eye of Love.
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / February 2022)
Also designed by Na Kim:
Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Øyehaug; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / January 2022)Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / March 2022)Either/Or by Elif Batuman; design by Na Kim (Penguin Press / May 2022)
You can read about Alban’s design process for Till the Wheels Come Off at Spine.
Worn by Sofi Thanhauser; design by Janet Hansen (Pantheon / January 2022)
Also designed by Janet Hansen:
A Country of Strangers by D. Nurkse; design by Janet Hansen (Knopf / April 2022)Sedating Elaine by Dawn Winter; design by Janet Hansen (Knopf / April 2022)
Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère; design by Rodrigo Corral (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / August 2022)
This month’s post includes a few covers that I missed earlier in the year along side the new and recent releases. I’m starting to think about my annual recap so please let me know if you think I’ve overlooked any other particularly notable covers that stood out for you and/or seemed emblematic of wider trends in 2022.
And just a reminder with all the stuff going on with social media that if you’d prefer to get new posts auto-magically emailed to you, you can subscribe here. I have also re-opened comments on new posts after closing them for a few months if you want to politely share your thoughts below.
“Fuuuuuuuuuck….!” is the only way I can describe the mixture of awe and annoyance that I hadn’t thought of it I felt when I saw this cover. So simple and so clever.
This has a very similar ‘obscured face collage’ feel to Tristan Offit’s cover for Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens, which I thought I had posted here earlier in the year but apparently did not (probably because I didn’t — and still don’t! — know who designed the cover of the UK edition (it was designed by Mel Four, photograph by Marta Bevacqua) and I wanted to post them together?).
Pacifique by Sarah L. Taggart; design by Natalie Olsen (Coach House Books / October 2022)
People Person by Candice Carty-Williams; design by Emma A. Van Deun (Scout Press / September 2022)
Mr. Keenan also designed the cover for the Liveright edition of The Waste Land itself a few years ago.
(The US edition of Matthew Hollis’s book, forthcoming from W. W. Norton, also has an interesting cover. If anyone from Norton would like to send me a hi-res image with the design credit, I’ll be happy to add it in!)
It’s been a while since I posted about author, illustrator and designer Coralie Bickford-Smith. In a new video for Penguin Books she talks about her creative process, her work on the original Clothbound Classics, and Penguin’s new Little Clothbound editions.