[Resource of the Day] – Cover Design Don’ts

Everyone knows the saying that “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” And yet all of us do. While some of us will make exceptions when we’re hunting for a specific title or author, most of the time, the cover is the first thing we use to judge whether or not we’re even interested in picking up a book. But believe it or not, it’s not just the artwork on the cover that affects our decision; it’s also the little details that our mind picks up subconsciously.

I love the way today’s article gets right to the point:

Did you know it costs just as much money to create a bad cover as a good one? Or that you can make a great cover mediocre with a few small changes? Even an award-winning image can fall flat if it’s paired with a poor font choice, or manipulated in a way that distracts from the overall impression the cover was intended to convey.

The author of the article goes on to explain that there are really two things wrong with most covers: the use of images, and the use of fonts. I certainly agree with the former; indy publishers often overreach, trying to cram complicated photographs or artwork onto covers when they really just need something simple and iconic. Trade publishers, on the other hand, often go so minimalist with their weird cookie-cutter designs that they set a bad example for the rest of the industry. A book cover should offer a teaser of what’s inside without giving away the surprise. It should entice, and nothing more. But too often, book covers seem to be trying to tell a story of their own. In the realm of fantasy and sci-fi books, the covers often don’t even match their respective stories.

I like what the author of this article has to say about images.

Many things can contribute to a poor cover design, but most of them stem from simple lack of knowledge. The most common mistake may be using an image that doesn’t properly demonstrate what the book is about. Remember, your book is selling the solution, not the problem. If you’re publishing a diet book, you’re selling fitness and slimness, so do not put an obese person on the cover. If your book is about raising a happy baby, do not display a picture of a crying toddler.

If there’s no way to illustrate your solution, then use a text-only cover or one with an abstract background that provides graphic detail but without any feature photo or illustration. Plenty of bestsellers have no images on them. And fight the urge to illustrate a word in the title improperly. If your book is called A Blueprint for Happiness, do not put the blueprints for a house on the cover. Your book is not about building houses.

Another mistake is what I call image desperation. Either no suitable images are available, or a publisher whose budget is too small to pay for an image decides to make do with free artwork. It’s never okay to put a typewriter on a guide for modern writers. Likewise, don’t use a photo of tattered old leather-bound books on a manual for publishers (except, perhaps, if it has a significant amount of material on using antiquarian books or library resources for research).

Then there’s the cliché. Puzzle pieces, chess pieces, and light bulbs have pretty much been done to death. Unless you’re confident that you’ve thought of a completely fresh way to handle these common images, don’t go there. The paper in the typewriter, the close-up of the keyboard, the giant calligrapher’s pen—they’ve all had their day too. Let them rest in peace. One of the worst examples of the cliché mistake that I’ve seen was on a business strategy book. Its cover featured a photo of a chess piece—the pawn.

This is all common sense sort of stuff, but what often happens to indy publishers is that they plan the cover on their own as an afterthought, or they hire an “artist” to mock up a cover instead of a professional designer. That’s fine, if the publisher can pull it off; it’s just one of many ways publishers can cut corners on costs. But if the cover fails the grab the reader’s attention, or in fact repels readers, the publisher has failed to do his or her most fundamental marketing duty: to package the book properly.

The second area of offense, fonts, is a little less obvious to most people. Part of the problem is that most of today’s computer users don’t know anything about the various font families that have been used in typesetting for decades, nor do they know that in print, a serif font should be used for regular type while a sans-serif font should be used for titles and headlines. They might not even know what a serif is. I’ve seen covers where the designer has used five or six different fonts on a single side. It looks atrocious, and while most consumers might not think “Ooh, these fonts are all wrong; I’m not going to buy this,” they will often, on some subconscious level, realize that something is wrong.

The author of the article addresses this as well:

But it’s not just images and fonts that are important. It’s the details and way they are handled that give a cover that polished, professional look.

Problem areas frequently include font selections and kerning (the space between letters). Inexperienced designers often leave too much space between letters, or make spacing uneven. As a general rule, tamper with default kerning only if type is 18 points or bigger, and make sure you or your designer uses the proper software, such as Illustrator, InDesign, Quark. or PageMaker, for laying out the full spread. PhotoShop should be reserved for image manipulation or creating the title and front cover. It is not designed to lay out small text blocks.

As for fonts, it’s rarely a good idea to mix one typeface with another of the same style (script, sans serif, serif). If you want to use a script font for the title, then find a serif or sans-serif font that goes well with it, instead of using another script font. And avoid inappropriate and trendy fonts. Comic Sans has no business on a book cover, and Papyrus, while it is popular, is now being overused.

One thing that’s not noted in this article, but worth mentioning all the same, is that many computers’ pre-installed fonts are not in the public domain, and you are actually supposed to pay a royalty for using them in commercial design by either purchasing the font license from the creator of the file or by paying a usage fee. The Microsoft standard fonts (Times New Roman, Verdana, Arial) are permitted for commercial use, as are many of the fonts used in open source projects like Linux. If you are unsure of whether or not you are permitted to use a font in your design, contact the creator of the font for more information. Alternately, if you work with a professional designer, he or she will more than likely own the license to a large library of fonts and will be able to find you a close approximate.

If you want to see some good examples of cover design, check out the Book Cover Express website. The folks at that company also run a Book Cover Design blog that’s loaded with good, technical information.

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