Designing a book cover can be an intimidating project. You need to create a single design that represents the entire contents of a book, the author’s intention, and also be able draw in potential readers. Balancing these items requires many considerations on how to make a unique design that will also sell copies of the book. While design and the expression of ideas are the main driving forces for the author and the cover designer, the book still needs to be sold and create a profit. Personal expression must be tempered by marketing appeal.
One issue that many designers have when approaching a book cover design is the desire to use the cover for their own personal expression. Designers may create works that express their opinions on the subject matter or how they perceive the content of the book. The main focus of a book cover design needs to be the clear visualization of the author’s work, the author’s tone, and the desires of the audience.
One helpful exercise is to list or ask the author for the main themes of the book. Is the book meant to be a whimsical fantasy or a serious historical analysis? This will help the designer pick key elements that represent those moods and attitudes. For example, a whimsical fantasy might use bright shades of purple to illustrate a mystical and fun story. But a serious historical analysis may use black and white photographs with deep red elements to show that contents are informative and grounded in reality. Working closely with the author and most importantly -- reading the book -- will help you home in on its message and style.
You may also want to find out what the readers want out of the book. If they want to escape boring everyday life or if they want to learn about a specific event. Each interest will take you down a different design path. The examples below show how these different factors can be considered with varying degrees of success.
The Designer's Opinions
The Author's
Opinions
The Reader's
Opinions
Combining
Opinions
Let’s say a cover design needs to be made for an epic science fiction novel that tells the story of an adventurer who travels across different worlds and visits a variety of alien cultures. This adventure must deal with many internal issues as he balances his desire to stay home with his family or sacrifice his comfortable life at home to save others in the galaxy.
If the designer approaches it with their own opinions, they may create a cover that expresses the opinion that science fiction is boring or maybe that the coolest thing about science fiction is the weird aliens.
 The book cover here doesn’t draw in the reader since it doesn’t express any desire to read the contents. |
 This book cover only shows one interesting alien and doesn’t express the epic journey of the hero. |
The author might think that the essence of the book is the conflict between the hero’s desire for the safety of his family or the safety of others. While that may be a very interesting element in the story, it doesn’t show the grand scale of the stories if the designer based the cover on that alone.
The potential readers might want to escape their normal nine to five work days and experience a grand adventure in new worlds across the galaxy. While these designs do show the epic scale of the books they don’t show the internal struggles that the main character is experiencing. This might mislead the readers and cause them to get frustrated with the book if it doesn’t match their expectations.
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A good cover design might combine all of these aspects to create a design the expresses the grand scale of the novel as well as the internal conflict of the main character.
This cover shows the conflicted main character while also showing that his adventure happens across the galaxy on interesting new worlds, and of course, with cool aliens.
