Fear by Bob Woodward; design by David Litman (Simon & Schuster / September 2018)
White text on a red background is not new, and I suspect it has never gone out of fashion for mass-market thrillers, but it’s interesting to see it reemerge as a “serious book” cover trend. The Real Lolita cover was designed by Sara Wood:
The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman; design by Sara Wood
Heartbreaker by Claudia Dey; design by Rachel Willey (Random House / August 2018)
Apparently we can’t get enough of the 1980s. This is essentially ‘The Night Begins to Shine’ rendered into a book cover (and if you don’t get that reference, I’m guessing you don’t have kids. And yes, I’m going to make you Google it)
Rachel also designed the retro cover for The Comedown by Rebekah Frumkin for Henry Holt earlier this year:
Heartbreaker by Claudia Dey; design by Rachel Willey (Random House / August 2018)
Night Moves by Jessica Hopper; design by Amanda Weiss (University of Texas Press / September 2018)
This reminds me of Kyle G. Hunter’s cover for A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley which I featured earlier this year. Apparently I like blurry urban nightscapes!
Since 2010, I’ve posted an annual survey of the year in book covers. The post has expanded and developed over the past 7 years, but essentially it is a collection of the covers published in the previous 12 months that I found interesting or noteworthy in some way. As with the previous couple of years, the 2017 list is organized by covers (alphabetical by title), and by designer so that I can show a greater variety of work, and no one designer or studio dominates.
Thank you to everyone who has supported the blog this year, and special thanks to all the designers, art directors, authors, publishers, and fellow design enthusiasts who have helped me with covers and design credits. My sincere apologies to the designers and publishers not on this year’s list and whose covers I have overlooked in the past 12 months.
A post looking back on the YA covers of 2017 is to follow.
