Cover Inspiration

The Opposite House

The flipped image caught my eye right away. There is something inherently interesting about things that are upside down, they just beg the viewer to ask why things are reversed. Of course turning things upside down to catch an eye would be irresponsible design, but in this case I think it serves a lot of purposes. First of all it creates an area that calls attention to the text. Also, given the title of the book, one can make the assumption that the opposite house is not the house opposite the street, but maybe opposite from a characters norm. This implies a lot about the story. And like it or not, someone browsing through a book store will be more likely to read the summary on the back if the cover looks like it is a book they would enjoy. I looked up a summary and the book deals with immigration.

The Fall of the Towers

I like how clean the text is in this cover, but I disagree that it was the best choice for the project. Giving the design the benefit of the doubt, I am assuming that this book offers a factual account of the event. If so, I do like the clean type and the way it is organized, however there could be more done to draw my attention to the content. This could be as simple as using capital letters, or possibly separating the authors name from the title in some way. The image is strong, compositionally, and there is a nice void that is created by the text in place of the towers. Yet, if this book is a clean and factually based non emotional account of the fall of the towers, it would be interesting to see how a clean, vector based image representing the absence of the towers would have worked.

Lost Decades

I think that this cover is a good example of how type and image can work together to communicate important information about the book. In this case, the title is ambiguous to content. Because the content would be read in order to gain a specific set of knowledge, it is important for the title to easily suggest what information it would contain. The title is clearly legible, and works with the graphic to convey a larger understanding about the essence of the book. I agree that the Authors names and tag line should not be written in the same font as the title, but I think that right now they are a tad too distracting. This could be improved by simply adding a line to separate them from the center graphic. Also, I think that the Author's names are too close to 'LOST.' It looks like it is meant to be the same distance as the text at the bottom is from the white arrow, but I think that it is awkward because 'LOST' creates such a strong vertical that it seems cramped, whereas the arrow is just one point that happens to be the lowest.