I’m even later than usual this month and everyoneelse posted their selections days ago, so you must really like book covers if you’re still jonesing for more! (And just a reminder: if you are in fact addicted to book covers and don’t want to miss any new posts, you can get them automatically sent to your inbox now. It’s not a newsletter, just magical RSS. But subscribing will confirm that you have a problem and should seek help!)
A bit of a Saul Bass / Hitchcock thing happening at the moment…? (The cover of the Faber edition of The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight was designed by Jack Smyth)
Earlier this year, a Canadian magazine asked me what the latest trends in book cover design were. I don’t think I had a very satisfactory answer. 2021 felt very much like a continuation of 2020, which itself felt like a year on hold.
The trends that came to mind were not exactly new. In no particular order: big faces (big sunglasses!); cropped faces; hands; mouths; postmodern typefaces;1 big skies; rainbows; gradients; the colour orange; psychedelia; collage; contemporary painting.
A lot was made of “blob” covers this year. I’m not sure that anything has really changed since Vulture published this article about “blocky” covers in 2019. They seemed like much the same thing.
Design is about the constraints and, as it turns out, the constraints around designing commercial literary fiction covers that have to work just as well online as in bookstores can lead to similar design solutions — large, legible type, and bright, abstract backgrounds. 2 The surprising thing is not that a few covers look the same when you squint; it’s that more of them don’t.
There were a lot of good covers (that didn’t look alike) in 2021. LitHub posted 101 of them. Still, it didn’t exactly feel like a vintage year.
Do I say that every December? Possibly.
A few years ago I worried that covers were moving in a more conservative direction, particularly at the big publishers. I’m not sure this has come to pass, at least not in the US. There are plenty of covers from the big, prestigious American literary imprints in this year’s list, as there were last year, and every year before that.
There are fewer covers from the UK in this year’s list than in previous years though, and I feel less confident about the situation there. From a distance, things seem a little sedate. I may be mistaken. It’s quite possible I haven’t see enough covers — or perhaps enough of the right ones — from British publishers to get a good sense of the overall picture.3
It would not be a surprise, however, if publishers were feeling a little risk-averse at the moment. We are two years into a global pandemic, experiencing a major supply chain issues, and living through a seemingly endless series of sociopolitical crises.
Nor would it be a surprise if designers were personally feeling the effects too — I’m not sure we are talking about this enough, and I’m not sure I know how to.
Thank you to everyone who has supported the blog in 2021. It means a lot. Here are this year’s book covers of note…
Na Kim talked to PRINT about her career and the designs for the Ditlevsen series in February. If, like me, you were wondering about typeface on the covers, it’s Prophet from Dinamo apparently.
If you’re wondering about the Super-Seventies Sally Rooney typeface, it is Ronda designed by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnese (I only know because I asked).
Thank you to everyone who has supported the blog in 2021. It means a lot.
I am not convinced that the term “postmodern” quite captures what I mean here (and/or worse, implies something different in the context of typography), but it’s the best I’ve got. I’m not talking about the kind of experimental typography you might associate with the likes of Wim Crouwel or Emigre, or the aesthetic of someone like David Carson. What I am trying to get at is idiosyncratic type that purposely exaggerates or plays with letterforms, and doesn’t conform to function-first modernism. To my mind, this would include some typefaces from the 1960s and 70s, as well as some more contemporary type. In a sense what I am describing is display faces — and I think the eclectic, innovative use of type in Victorian advertising might be an inspiration to designers here — but I don’t think it is just about size. ↩
This will be the last of the monthly cover round-ups for 2021 because I have to turn my attention to the year as a whole, but there are some really top-notch covers in this month’s post so it feels like a good place leave off…
The cover of the UK edition, publishing next year I believe, was designed by Jack Smyth:
Jacket Weather by Mike DeCapite; design by Michael Salu (Soft Skull / October 2021)
I was reminded of the cover of The Empty Chair by Bruce Wagner designed by Gregg Kulick from what seems like an age ago (2013 I think?) . It’s very possible I have been doing this for too long…
A big, messy post this month as I catch up on the new releases and some of the covers I missed over the summer. I expect the next couple of month’s might be a bit like this as I work towards my round-up of the year, so feel free to let me know about stuff that you think I’ve overlooked in 2021.
For some reason, I was reminded of this saucy Jacob Covey cover, which I thought was killed in favour of something more (ahem) traditional, but it still exists on Amazon, so who knows? (Jacob probably knows; I do not).
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?
They look very different, but I was reminded of another sunset sky cover designed by Lauren from earlier this year. It’s interesting to see the (presumably) coincidental themes in a designers work.
I quite enjoy seeing contemporary painting being used on book covers. A couple of other recent examples that come to mind are Jennifer Carrow’s recent cover for Lorna Mott Comes Home with art by Barbara Hoogeweegen, and Stephen Brayda’s cover for last year’s The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde with art by Scott Naismith (another sunset sky cover! I guess After the Sun could also be included in this trend broadly speaking. It is not quite the kind of painterly art I am thinking of though…).
I’m drawing lots of unnecessary comparisons today, but I was reminded of this Oliver Munday cover from a while back if only for the similar-ish colour combinations (I was going to say palette, but… ). It reminds me of something else too, I just can’t quite put my finger on it…
If I didn’t already know who the publisher was, I would not have been able to tell you if this was an American or British cover despite the subtitle and very American imagery. I don’t think it would like out of place on the Allen Lane list for example.
I didn’t blog much this year. It felt strange to be posting about something as trivial as book covers during a deadly pandemic. 2020 has been a tough year. I feel lucky that my family are safe and well, and I have kept my job and my health. I know others have not been so fortunate.
It has been hard.
I haven’t read much and I’ve struggled to keep track of new work. Toronto has been in lockdown for most of 2020. Browsing bookstores hasn’t been possible, and I didn’t spend as much time as usual trawling for covers online. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of covers in this year’s post are featured here for the first time.
Looking back at last year’s post, I was apparently feeling gloomy about the state of things in 2019 too.1 If I remember correctly, I was — in the midst of everything — trying to get through sales conference, wrap up a big project before the holidays, and feeling more than a little stressed. Somehow I still managed to write a little bit about the trends I was seeing. A few things — painterly covers for example — seem to have continued into 2020. Lydian certainly hasn’t gone away. It felt so common, in fact, I stopped keeping track of individual examples. On the other hand, I did see less Avant Garde for which I am quietly grateful (although I’m not sure that’s a popular sentiment).
At The Literary Hub, Emily Temple declared 2020 to be “the year of enormous pink lady faces on book covers.” While at Spine Magazine, Viki Hendy collected together examples of covers with type around the edges. I don’t know that I have a lot to add that. There were a few new meta, books on book covers this year, which is always a delight. And I think perhaps collage might be having a moment too, which is fun. Although we may be overdoing the half-face compositions.
Suppose A Sentence by Brian Dillon; design by Katy Homans; art by John Stezaker (NYRB / September 2020)
The Lightness by Emily Temple; design by Ploy Siripant; art by Beth Hoeckel (William Morrow / June 2020)
There is, of course, a lag. Trends always bleed over from one year to the next. One of this year’s “big books”, Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, which featured a bright and bold cover designed by Vi-An Nguyen, was published in the US on December 31, 2019. A lot of 2020 books have been delayed until 2021. But I wonder how the changes in the way we work and consume brought on by the pandemic — designing in isolation for an audience that is now browsing predominantly online — will change things in the next couple of years. Will we see more experimentation or less? Will there be demand for beautiful tactile objects, or will we more fully embrace digital reading experiences? There’s a lot to ponder…
Anyway, thanks to all the folks who have supported the Casual Op this year and encouraged me to keep it going. I’m sorry that I have not responded to all the emails I have received. I’m going to try to be a bit better with that in future. Hopefully there have been some silver linings for you in 2020, and you can still find some joy in a few good book covers…
Afterland by Lauren Beukes; design by Lauren Wakefield (Penguin / July 2020)
Also designed by Lauren Wakefield:
The Driftwood Girls by Mark Douglas-Home; design by Lauren Wakefield (Penguin / April 2020)
The Honey and the Sting by E. C. Freemantle; design by Lauren Wakefield (Penguin / September 2020)
We Are All the Same in the Dark by Julia Heaberlin; design by Lauren Wakefield (Penguin / August 2020)
Sadly, Adalis unexpectedly passed away in July 2020. I only knew Adalis through her work, but she is such a huge a loss to our community. There is a GoFundMe page if you wish to donate to her family.
Also designed by Adalis Martinez:
losi by Molly Ball; design by Adalis Martinez (Henry Holt & Co / May 2020)
Dominicana by Angie Cruz’ design by Adalis Martinez (Flatiron / August 2020)
Love is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar; design by Adalis Martinez (Catapult / February 2021)
You can find a short interview with John in which he discusses his cover for Red Pill at Bear Books, and you can read about his design process for Weather by Jenny Offill at Spine Magazine.
As it is almost the end of October this is going to be my last monthly round-up for 2020. I will endeavour to put together a post on the book covers of year soon, but I am sure a lot of great work skimmed under my radar, so designers please drop me a line if I have missed a cover (or two!) you really loved working on (the book has to have been published this year), especially if it was for an independent or university press. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this month’s selections.
They’re really not all that alike (it’s funny how memory constantly plays this trick on me), but the colour palette and the typographic approach of Alex’s cover reminded me Luke Bird’s 2017 cover for Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar:
Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag; design by Luke Bird (Faber & Faber / April 2017)
Maybe someone has done this before and I didn’t notice (or, more likely forgotten), but it’s great to see a photograph from the EPA’s remarkable DOCUMERICA Project — available through the US National Archives on Flickr — on a book cover.
Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld; design by Jo Thomson (Doubleday / July 2020)
It’s interesting that the US cover of Rodham is essentially the same as the UK one. I would’ve thought for sure that they would take different approaches.
The cover of the UK edition, which will not be published until 2021(!), was designed by Craig Fraser. It has a very vintage Faber feel… maybe it’s just the type?
This reminded me of the cover of the similarly themed American Manifesto by Bob Garfield, designed by Richard Ljoenes and published earlier this year by Counterpoint….
This cover immediately reminded me of Helen Crawford-White’s cover A Half-Baked Ideaby Olivia Potts published last year…
And then I thought maybe it was a nod to the cover of The White Album by Joan Didion, published in 1979 (the reissue below uses the original cover), and which Fonts in Use informs me uses the typeface Pistilli Roman. But maybe I am over thinking it…?
I was also reminded of these two recent covers, so maybe it is just a thing…?
I believe this is only available as an ebook, which seems a bit of shame. It would be nice to see in print. The cover does remind me of something else though. I can’t think what exactly. The best I could come up with was Tyler Comrie‘s cover for The Unwanted by Michael Dobbs. But I feel like there is cover that does something similar with a painting as a background? Possibly I’m just imagining it.
Oh and for those of you who are interested, the design team at Penguin Random House Canada have started posting their work to Instagram as one_last_tweak.
Fracture by André Neuman; design by June Park (Farrar Straus & Giroux / May 2020)
2019 has felt interminable. It has also felt like there are never enough hours in the day to keep up. You can’t talk to me about TV shows or movies. I haven’t seen any.
When it comes to books, I’m fortunate enough to work in the industry. But what hope do casual readers have of finding the good stuff when the same few titles dominate the conversation and there is so much else competing for their attention?
Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid; design by Caroline Teagle Johnson (Ballantine / March 2019) Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid; design by Lauren Wakefield (Hutchinson / March 2019)
Daisy Jones and the Six had a glamorous, louche 1970s look. The US and UK editions, designed by Caroline Teagle Johnson and Lauren Wakefield respectively, took slightly different directions with the type, but the photograph (a stock image apparently) felt ideally suited to social media.
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood; design by Noma Bar (Chatto & Windus / September 2019)The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood; art direction by Christopher Moisan; illustration by Patrik Svensson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt / April 2017)
The Testaments was everywhere and, like the recent Vintage Classics reissue of The Handmaid’s Tale, the cover illustration was unmistakably by Noma Bar. We live in an age where every cult movie and TV show gets a ‘minimalist’ poster now, and I found that The Testaments looked too familiar for me to find it engaging. It didn’t help that the cover of the 2017 US reissue of the The Handmaid’s Tale by Swedish illustrator by Patrik Svenson had already featured a similar 3/4s silhouette. Nevertheless, it was perhaps a bolder cover choice than I’m giving it credit for. If nothing else, it showed that bright green on book covers — once cursed and reviled — is suddenly all the rage!
In terms of trends, 2019 felt more like a continuation of previous years rather than a break with the past. There was a kind of conservatism to a lot of the covers I saw. My sense was that highly polished designs that looked comfortingly familiar were being approved over riskier ones that stood out from the crowd. The most interesting covers often came from small publishers, especially New Directions who seem to be giving a bit more creative license to the designers they work with (some of whom have 9-5s at much bigger publishers!).
Big centred blocks of utilitarian white type over elaborate backgrounds continued to be a mainstay. It’s the book cover as poster, and it works at any size, so I don’t think it’s going away any time soon.
Handwriting and hand-lettering remained popular too, although my sense is that enthusiasm is starting to wane as publishers are opting for greater legibility and designers are turning back to vintage type styles to give a sense of authenticity and craft. (I’m willing to admit the evidence might not back me up on this, however!)
Fun, swishy 1970s-inspired serifs like Benguiat Caslon revival Cabernet are back. People keep trying to make ITC Avant Garde — another iconic 1970s typeface — happen again too. I don’t think it works for the most part, but I can see why designers think it’s cool in a coked-up New York way. Warren Chappell’s earnest calligraphic sans serif Lydian, originally released in 1938, continued its unlikely rise as a go-to literary typeface. It even got an explainer at Vox.
Black and white portrait photography has been the staple of biographies and classics for years, so it was interesting to see closely cropped black and white photographs used on the covers of a couple of new literary novels this year. This isn’t entirely new obviously. Black and white photography has long been used to signify that something is “art” (as opposed to, say, “pornography”). But I think the latest iteration of trend was started by Cardon Webb‘s 2015 cover for A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara which used a black and white photograph by the late Peter Hujar.
Coincidentally the cover of the US edition of Garth Greenwell’s new novel Cleanness, publishing early 2020, was designed by Thomas Colligan and uses contemporary black and white photograph by Jack Davison. (The UK edition, designed by Ami Smithson fits this trend a little less neatly, but features black and white photograph by Mark McKnight)
Something that I didn’t anticipate was the use of contemporary landscape and figure painting on the covers of some the big literary releases of the year. Like black and white photography, it felt almost pre-digital — a grasp at traditional values of craft. I don’t know if I would go as far as to say it is a rejection of post-modernism. But maybe it is? I don’t know. Discuss amongst yourselves.
The Innocents by Michael Crummey; design by Emily Mahon; art by Diana Dabinett (Doubleday / August 2019)The World Doesn’t Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott; design by Laywan Kwan; art by Fahamu Pecou (Liveright / August 2019)Inland by Téa Obrecht; design by Jaya Miceli; art by Tamara Ruiz (Random House / August 2019)
Thank you to all the designers and art directors who’ve been in touch and helped me identify covers for my posts. I’m sorry if I haven’t replied to your message. It’s been a year.
Aug 9 — Fog by Kathryn Scanlan; design by Na Kim (Farrar Straus & Giroux MCD / June 2019)
Also designed by Na Kim:
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson; design by Na Kim (Scribner / April 2019)Mother Winter by Sophia Shalmiyev; design by Na Kim (Simon & Schuster / February 2019) High School by Tegan & Sara; design by Na Kim (MCD / September 2019)
Muscle by Alan Trotter; design by Gray318 (Faber & Faber / February 2019)
Also designed by Gray318:
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie; design by Gray318 (Jonathan Cape / August 2019) Grand Union by Zadie Smith; design by Gray318 (Hamish Hamilton / October 2019)Salt On Your Tongue by Charlotte Runcie; design by Gray318 (Canongate / January 2019)
What We Really Do All Day by Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan; design Matthew Young (Pelican / September 2019)Artificial Intelligence by Melanie Mithcell; design by Matthew Young (Pelican / October 2019)
One Day by Gene Weingarten; design by David Litman (Blue Rider / October 2019)
Oliver Munday wrote about designing the cover for New Directions at Literary Hub earlier this year.
He also designed a lot my favourite covers this year…
Riots I Have Known by Ryan Chapman; design by Oliver Munday (Simon & Schuster / May 2019)The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead; design by Oliver Munday (Doubleday / July 2019)Thick by Tressie McMillan Cotton; design by Oliver Munday (The New Press / January 2019)White Flights by Jess Row; design by Oliver Munday (Graywolf / August 2019) Harbart by Nabarun Bhattacharya; design by Oliver Munday (New Directions / June 2019)
The Revolutionaries by Joshua Furst; design by Tyler Comrie (Knopf / April 2019)The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa; design by Tyler Comrie (Pantheon / August 2019)Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg; design by Tyler Comrie; illustration Justin Metz (Knopf / June)
The Volunteer by Salvatore Scibona; design by Rachel Willey (Penguin / March 2019)
Also designed by Rachel Willey:
The New Me by Halle Butler; design by Rachel Willey (Penguin / March 2019) The Need by Helen Phillips; design Rachel Willey (Simon & Schuster / July 2019)
