3 Strategies for Great Book Cover Design
In the first class of my first year in art school, we were asked:”What do you want to do with your art degree after graduation?”
My immediate answer: “Design book covers!”and, more quietly, “Sting’s next album cover” (hey, it was 1997).
Fast forward a bunch of decades and degrees, book covers are still one of my favourite things to design.
If that’s you too, here are some tips to doing it well.
a Kids These Days case study
1. Learn as much as you can about the book’s intended readers
What does it mean to be a teacher? Like designing, teaching is something that most of us do on a fairly regular basis. I’ve taught my kid how to put on socks; too few years later, my kid taught me how to make Tik Toks.
Then there are the Teachers — those who have devoted their own education and careers to guiding the study of art, math, or science; those who, through intention and practice, create entire environments conducive to learning. Sometimes their title is quite literal but just as often those who teach work as bus drivers, custodians, hockey coaches, therapists, or social workers. Some carry band-aids for that school yard fall, while others create mnemonics for the 300 names in their Psych101 course.
Kids These Days (2019) — Jody Carrington’s first book — was written for all kinds of teachers: the certified instructors and the aunties. Mostly self-published, the book’s success leveraged the popularity and social media presence of its author, but also leaned on design to help communicate legitimacy and authority and connect with its intended readers.
kids are the least of our worries
Carrington’s premise is that our kids will be just fine as long as we look after those who teach them. In the book’s eight chapters, we find developmental psychology, trauma, grief, and leadership, culminating in practical strategies for creating a more trauma-informed, reconnected classroom.
Though not about kids, the success of Kids These Days hinged on its ability to grab the attention of those who teach them (primarily K-12 educators). The obvious visual territory for its cover design included blackboards, school supplies, apples, kids and teachers, alphabet blocks, school desks, and playgrounds. While these symbols would likely succeed in connecting the right readers with the book’s subject matter, they present a problematic lack of “tension” while also over simplifying the classroom experience. Tension is an important factor in much of promotional design. Through the careful application of tension, designers hope to push through the din of competing visual messages while not alienating their intended audience.
2. Find ways to explore the text
Remember the tagline for Kids These Days? It’s “The kids are the least of our worries.” When we look at the book’s actual content — its text — we discover that “kids” occurs most often (if we ignore such words as: the, is, and, was). In fact, “kids” and “kid” are two times more frequent than any other word written in the book (with 397 instances). Contrasts between the author’s vision and the text offer an interesting challenge to the design of the book’s cover.
While author intent and market analysis are both important to a designer’s discovery process, text analysis tools such as Voyant help us look into the text to uncover insights directly from content.
In the case of Kids These Days, analyzing the text helped us create “concept themes” that we then used during the ideation phase of the project:
- “Time” and “Learn”
- “Story” and “Moment”
- “Relationship” and “Sense”
- “Space” and “Connection”
Think of each theme as a point of intersection — a shared space with design concepts (ideas) located within the overlap. While “Relationship” offers up communication, contact, bond, dependence, and connection; and “Sense” gives us feel, touch, sensation, sight, and smell; “Relationship” intersecting with “Sense” inspires sensitivity, memory, impact, time (change), and affect.
3. Use rhetorical devices to play with tension
In the 1979 book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, James Gibson describes the concept of “affordance” — what an environment offers an organism, either for good or ill. Affordance depends on an organism’s intent and needs, thus explaining how the same aspect of an environment will offer different affordances to different individuals, or even different affordances to the same individual at different times. For example to a child, a small but sturdy desk will afford sitting while, to an adult, it affords the opportunity to move or reposition it.
The image on the cover of Kids These Days invites us to sit at that desk or stand in front of it and observe our reaction to the experience. The photograph is tightly-cropped, and the cyan blue cinder block walls and heavily-worn wood floor tell us it’s a classroom not a hospital or institution. The close focus, warm light, and use of texture read as more than “furniture”, “wall”, or “floor”. We see use over years, even generations, by many hands, feet, and backpacks, and the aloneness of the desk shows us abandonment but, perhaps, perseverance.
We might respond to the image with some form of nostalgia based on our own classroom memories. Or, the illustrated decay may stir a sense of injustice and a desire for change. Is the visual evidence of repeated use over time a metaphor for old ideas that need to be left behind so that we can embrace new ways of teaching? Or, is there an opportunity to reclaim the kinds of relationships that were possible in small classrooms?
The main character in a visual story
Rhetoric and rhetorical devices are powerful communication tools — in speech, writing, and visual design. They help us understand, discover, and develop the kinds of “arguments” that will persuade others towards particular mindsets or actions. “Buying Kids These Days” is an action while “Because it will help you be a better teacher” is a type of argument.
While we can spot several rhetorical devices in the cover of Kids These Days, here I’ll focus on two — personification and part for whole — looking at that little desk a bit more closely. Earlier, I argued that it’s the main character in the cover’s visual story. Personification is a technique where an animal, inanimate object, or idea is given (attributed) human characteristics. One of the more famous examples of personification is the 2002 (and sequels) IKEA Lamp commercial: a woman unplugs a little red lamp, takes it outside, and leaves it on a rainy sidewalk next to the trash. Through the use of music, pacing, camera angle, and subtle animation, the lamp becomes oddly human — its hunched frame appears sad and pitiful. A man on the sidewalk challenges our sympathy (our act of personifying the lamp) by saying “Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you’re crazy. It has no feelings! And the new one is much better.”
Back to our little desk. While much more subtle (and heavily dependent on a viewer’s particular relationship to classrooms) the desk can either be a stand-in for a student or its own character (person) in the story. Both as a student and as a character it calls for our attention and care, but it also stands-in for something much larger (that’s where part-for-whole comes in). It’s not just one desk, but teaching and teachers, learning and children. The desk (the floor, the room) is worn but not worn out. It can — does — still have purpose — matter.
Kids These Days has sold over 100,000 copies since 2019.
Milena Radzikowska is a Professor of Information Design at Mount Royal University. She can be found @DrRadzikowska on Twitter and is also one half of Two Hot Soups Design Consulting based in Calgary, Alberta.
