The cover: a visual trip for both publisher and book buyer
The design of a cover of a book is the face of the project and a lot of time and effort goes into getting this right. A lot of the time, first impressions matter, and it can be the encouragement in making people choose your book off the shelves and not the competitor’s, or walking away from the store and spending their money on something completely different.
The book cover has to be designed in such a way to attract the viewer into the story, even if it is a book of non-fiction. The cover of the book has to give a picture of what the story is about, without revealing too much, but to entrap the potential customer in the spiderweb of literary magic, some bait is needed and this where the cover comes in. It has to play on the heart strings of intrigue and idle curiosity.
In using templates, design teams throughout the world can make use of color and visuals to get the design top notch and can also tap into prospective consumer’s psyche to access memories, association with places and things and can end up encouraging people to buy the product and can help move the company in question that bit higher up the corporate ladder than the competition.
In using templates for a design project, the process is automated and streamlined and as the project is about to begin, it can give them a little direction. The best way around this is by using a mood board, which is a useful way to enclose images, colors, text, photographs, or examples of other covers that encapsulate the appearance and feel of what they are aiming at in the design. Mood boards can either be digital or they can be physical, they can have a lot of different sources of inspiration or merely a few and as they go along designers can refer to the mood board for inspiration, direction, and guidance.
There are a lot of aspects that need to be included in the design of a cover, including typographic elements (such as the name of the author, title of the book, and so on), colors, and graphic elements (like photographs and illustrations). Without care though, the cover design can start to be crowded visually, and it is possible that this will lessen the impact. An effective cover design can avert this by paying close attention to the balance and space.
Book cover design makes a lot of use of color and colors produce a variety of different feelings and emotions in people and can trigger anything from memories to associations to different things. This whole concept is called color psychology. And if a design team can understand the psychology behind a range of colors, then people can be enticed to the end product.
It is advisable to stay with colors that evoke an emotional reaction to what the designers are looking for in a target audience; for example, if a person wrote a book about meditation, then blue and green are good choices to make people to feel calm and serene. On the other hand, if a team is designing a sales book, then by incorporating red into the cover design, clients will be made to feel passionate and excited.
Templates are not always the answer and in using templates for a design project, the end result can be something mechanical and overly cold, and can sometimes lose the idea that the process of buying a book is a lot of the time emotive and thought provoking on the part of the shopper, who is often attracted to a cover by the message it is instilling in him on first sight. Book covers are a visual collaboration between the publishing design team and the potential customer and book buyer, and the result can be a rewarding one for both parties involved.