OUGD503 - Studio brief 01 - Research

I looked into current trends in book cover design to gain an insight to what is popular, as digital mediums are taking over the reading and publishing market, we’ve seen book design trends and styles change as well. Trends of today include black background / striking contrast, huge cities and huge type, small dots and understatement. Below are some examples of book cover designs I find inspiring, the use of type catches my eye the most I noticed in looking into book cover designs. I found two Penguin covers which I like, both using face iconography / symbols on the cover which I find very powerful. I also visited Waterstones and Blackwells to look at book cover designs and took pictures of the ones that caught my eye the most then analysed why.

I like the book to the right because of its simple illustrations and use of a basic colour palette but what made me give this book cover a second look is the layout of the type. The titling 'Houses' is striking due to the stencil font in use then the positioning of the other type elements in the cover are carefully placed so they don't clash with the large illustrations.

The Languages of Cities cover works well thanks to the grayscale imagery of buildings, objects etc which help highlight the sans serif typeface title. Also the way the random objects have been placed together in order makes this is a eye catching cover as it combines these images which have no correlation to each other, and makes them work cohesively on a cover.