Book Cover Redesigns
While you’re never supposed to judge a book by its cover, many older books in today’s publishing world are able to attract new readers and generate waves of new sales through updated cover designs. For this project, I redesigned two covers for existing, published books. One of these books was a satirical novel by Kevin Nguyen titled New Waves; the other, a philosophical novel published in the 1960s by Jacob Bronowski named The Identity of Man. New Waves is about two workers—a Black woman and an Asian-American man—at a tech startup as they bond over their low social status at work, prompting them to steal some of their company’s confidential user information. The story ultimately becomes an exploration of one man's loneliness in the modern world and how he tries to find lasting connections, while Bronowski’s novel analyzes the complex nature of human identity and relationships.
Researching the story in these two books helped me in the first phase of my design process: brainstorming visuals and creating thumbnail sketches of the covers. First, I distilled each book into its core concepts by tracing its themes, motifs, and plots with bullet points. I decided that my New Waves cover would communicate isolation and breaches of privacy, while The Identity of Man cover would explore human connection and self-perception through imagery of the eye. Focusing on these themes let me draw a variety of visual motifs in my sketchbook, such as a surrealist computer screen-diary, cracked screens, and human profiles. I then shifted my focus towards creating a first attempt at cover layouts that explored some of these concepts with Adobe InDesign.
Since I favor book covers with surrealist illustrations and graphics, my first drafts tried to mimic this design style, and they were unsuccessful. The covers’ background art was too plain, and my graphics for a locked computer-journal amalgam looked flat, which made each cover’s text look out of place. A week later I had two conceptual breakthroughs: first, that book covers can attract attention without using illustrations, and second, that designers can still show their creativity without crafting every project element themselves. I had believed that a good book designer always used their own graphics when making covers. My research into contemporary book trends, however, showed that there is an increasing number of visually dynamic covers that utilize photography, which helped me back out of the corner I boxed myself into. Consequently, my later drafts incorporated Unsplash images with dramatic lighting and interesting color schemes that I manipulated to complement each book’s underlying themes and plot points.
For Nguyen’s cover, I used blue Matrix-inspired computer code,while Bronowski’s cover worked best with a monochromatic close-up of a man’s eye. For Nguyen’s book, I also included an asterisk-password graphic I created to emphasize the main character’s isolation—a compromise with my initial desire to make graphics. These new directions also prompted ideas for title and subhead fonts that wouldn’t take attention away from the cover art. While determining which typefaces worked best boiled down to a soul-crushing process of trial and error, the intentional consideration of my fonts was equally as important as the cover art. After enough deliberation, I ultimately chose to use Arial, Quicksand, and Big Caslon as my primary typefaces.
Despite deviating from my initial plan, I was pleased with my progress and accepted that I didn’t need to craft every visual element from scratch in order to be an effective designer. I even got more practice choosing typefaces, although I still don’t have a refined methodology for doing so, aside from prioritizing optimal legibility. When I was finished, I used a Photoshop mockup to simulate how the covers would appear standing on a table, choosing coolly toned background colors and lighting to emphasize the drama present in each of my books. Even with my hesitancy to use photos as primary design content, I’m satisfied with how I refined my thumbnail sketches into cohesive compositions and adapted my thinking to both incorporate new design ideas and overhaul initial ones.