Book Cover Archive blog

Apparently he’s got an honest-to-gawd, irony-free, hard-boiled detective novel coming soon. “Conversational Reading” has an excerpt.

So let me get this straight… “The Goddamned” Frank Miller designed an edition of Gravity’s Rainbow, but when Pynchon writes a real noir novel we get this?

Oh dang.
Make sure you read the part about his ghost/celebrity sighting of Thomas Pynchon.

*cough*increaseyourtypesizeplease*cough*

Gesundheit.

Mendelsund’s portfolio

(via Books Covered)

Designer Heman Chong has taken it upon himself to redesign the covers of SciFi classics. It’s a subject that’s close to our hearts, so we’re more critical than we would be otherwise.

We applaud the effort, and in theory we love what he’s done here, but the final product comes up a bit short. We love DIN as much as the next design nerd, but the type seems half-again larger than it needs to be, and the geometric shapes are great, but the majority of them don’t relate back to the story in any decipherable way and seem to be little more than decoration. Maybe that’s the point? Hard to say without a concept statement of any sort.

Either way, it’s a great effort and we’d love to see more of this kind of thinking. Check out the full set at his website.

(via vvork)

At some point in the last couple months, Sam Potts updated his site and no one told us.

As I’m sure is the case for a lot of people, Potts came to our attention through his work on the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.

Surprise of all surprises, he’s done a bunch of other solid work. Here’s a small handful, filtered for contextual appropriateness:

And now you know.

Japanese book covers from Grain Edit

Image is a reworked Shutterstock image. I had to widen the aisle and add those strips of metal that form the bus part of the star. – David Drummond

Kenneth Whyte, editor in chief of Macleans magazine, has an interesting writeup of the cover design process for his latest book, The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst.

Passionate about the topic and frustrated with the solutions being provided to him by Random House, he goes from passive to obsessed, refusing to promote the book unless the cover gets to a point where he’s happy with it. Ultimately, he concedes and accepts the design provided by RH’s in-house staff.

Covers matter. At Maclean’s magazine, we sell between 7,000 and 21,000 copies a week on newsstands, and the most obvious variables week to week are the cover subject, the cover image, and the cover line, which means that when we nail a cover, we can sell three times as many copies as when we don’t.

…

I offered my editor a long but polite list of suggestions for alterations to her proposed covers. … It wasn’t long, however, before I was drafting designers of my acquaintance in Toronto, Montreal, and New York to produce alternatives to what I was now referring to as “the atrocities” coming out of the Random House art department.

…

My assistant said, “I bet they hate you at Random House, but I guess you’re used to that.”

The final design, put out by Random House Canada:

We can’t say we blame him for his frustration. The provided cover isn’t exactly inspiring or inspired. For someone used to dealing with the high-impact, competition-laden world of the magazine rack, we can see how it would appear muddled and clumsy. We count three images, 3 typefaces, five font-styles and outlined text, all of which varies slightly between browns and greys. The images used are ambiguous, providing a hint of more information but not really delivering on the promise, providing a lot of noise for little payoff.

We prefer the cover put out by Counterpoint publishing for the same book. There’s not much to it, but at least the tone looks important and on the level with similar titles about Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, or Rockefeller.

(via ffffound)

The Chronicle Books Blog has a nice writeup about the cover design process behind one of their latest design books, The Art of the Movie Poster.

The one on the bottom right is our favorite:

(via The Strange Attractor)