Judge a Book by its Cover

My new favorite website has to be Book Covers, a pseudo-weblog by Fwis (which I gather is some kind of design firm, but I can’t seem to find any real information about them anywhere) where they post interesting book covers and have users comment on the design, typography, and anything else that the cover may evoke. There’s some good discussion on some of the covers, but what’s even better is that the site allows you to see a bunch of covers together, giving the reader a brilliant visual reference and context behind emerging design trends and book marketing techniques.

That being said, I’ve always had a fundamental problem with the saying, “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” Though I can see the underlying social comment the idiom is trying to make, if this were true, websites such as Book Covers (or even Rebecky’s cover gallery, Osprey Design’s Foreword, and Readerville’s Coveted Covers forum) would have no reason to exist. Book cover design is a nuanced (and apparently well-paying) art form because many of our choices in our everyday lives are based on snap judgements (Blink, anyone?), and I don’t think that that is necessarily a bad thing. While a poor cover design won’t make me want to read a well-recommended book (like Salinger’s Nine Stories, for example) any less, but a captivating cover will make me want to pick up books that don’t make the best-seller list but can be equally as well-written. (A great title also helps.)

Cover design is obviously something publishers take very seriously nowadays, but I must commend Penguin UK for upping the bar on cover design through their Great Ideas series. First of all, the series itself, packing seminal works by influential authors into small and easy-to-read paperback volumes, is a work of genius. But more importantly, Penguin solicited David Pearson, Phil Baines, Catherine Dixon, and Alistair Hall to come up with a visual aesthetic for the series that has shattered the limitations of typography and has revolutionized the domain of simple-but-visually-striking cover design.

If the Great Ideas series is any indication of things to come, cover design is only beginning to enter it’s Golden Age. I, for one, embrace this rejuvenation of the celebration of typography and the visual aesthetic, as it means a better reading experience for all consumers of the printed word. And in the meantime, hop on over to Book Covers and submit your favorite book cover design so that we can all share in the glory of good design.