12 May 2019

I love… Bold book cover design


I read the book Where’d You Go, Bernadette purely because I fell in love with the bold cover design by Keith Hayes. It’s so simple and effective. Just after reading the book I was making a card for the birthday of a colleague who was very into photography, and my design was (deliberately) very much influenced by the book cover.

Some of my artwork from an illustration summer school course had a similar bold style, mainly because I was limited in terms of what papers were available when I was making poster sized pieces. 

More recently, I read the Kevin Kwan books Crazy Rich Asians, China Rich Girlfriend, and Rich People Problems, which, again, have very bold covers, designed by Joan Wong. 


This flat design style has been a real trend in book cover design over the past few years. Other examples include A Window Opens by Elisabeth Egan, This One is Mine by Maria Semple, The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, and those in the image below. I love the bright colours, bold shapes, and clean edges of this vector-based style of design. It reminds me of some designs from the 1980s but with a totally different colour palette, and also of vintage travel posters. 


It's not just novels - a couple of the factual books I've read recently had bright covers.
Looking at all these designs left me inspired to try more bold designs using cut paper, and sparked the idea for a 100 day project!

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