2012 was a great year for books — and maybe even a better one for book covers. We were so overwhelmed by the number of great ones that we couldn’t rally our thoughts to any kind of end-of-year list — so we figured we’d go to the experts (book jacket designers, of course) and ask what they thought. After the jump, feast your eyes on the favorite book cover designs of the year from a few rock star book cover designers, and let us know which ones are your favorites in the comments. … Read More
John Gall
15 of the Sexiest Book Covers of All Time [NSFW]
This week’s release of T. Cooper’s Real Man Adventures, a heartfelt memoir with a sexy, pulp fiction-inspired cover, inspired us to seek out the sexiest book covers of all time.… Read More
The Very Best of Book Cover Design
There’s nothing we love more here at Flavorpill HQ than judging books by their covers. Be it plausible-seeming but tonally inappropriate covers or dust jackets that scream “don’t date me!”, we admit that it’s awfully fun to pooh-pooh the cliché adage. Dear readers, mark your calendars, for today — thanks to your help — we’re going to set all snark and judgement aside and take a look at excellent reads that also happen to have extraordinarily well-designed covers.
In honor of the adorably outfitted, exceptionally designed (inside and out) Prius c, design love is all around, so join us as we round-up engaging prose combined with exceptional design. Showcasing the work of legendary typographers, art directors and graphic designers alike, click through to see what stunning contributions the literary world has made to design, and vice versa. Tell us your favorite from our selection in the comments below! … Read More
10 Beautiful Literary Box Sets
This week, we caught our first peek at the beautiful American paperback edition of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, arranged as a mini box set and designed by John Gall (the guy behind pretty much all of the American paperbacks of Murakami’s books). Since Chip Kidd’s hardcover design was so amazing, we have to say that we’re impressed and excited that the paperback version is living up to it. To tide us over until the book is actually in our hands, we’ve taken a look at a few other beautiful box sets — from the simple to the extravagant — that we totally covet for our shelves. Click through to drool along with us, and let us know if we missed your favorite in the comments. … Read More
15 Gorgeous Book Cover Redesigns
This week, the always excellent Everyman’s Library released a gorgeous new printing of Phillip Pullman’s epic fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials. Not only is it a beautiful edition, but it’s the first time that the three books have been published in one volume, so it is quite a neat little package. Inspired by Pullman’s wonderfully evocative new cover, we’ve collected a few other utterly gorgeous book cover redesigns for your viewing pleasure. Many of these are full backlist redesigns — after all, there’s something magical about a set of books designed to be together — but all of them are, we think, rather glorious. Click through to feast your eyes on these redesigned books, and let us know if we’re missed any of your favorites in the comments! … Read More
The Best of the 30 Covers in 30 Days Project
By now, most of you probably know about NaNoWriMo, the annual month of writing sponsored by nonprofit the Office of Letters and Light. What you may not know is that every year 30 novels-in-progress being written through NaNoWriMo are chosen to receive the full cover design treatment, courtesy of a team of professional designers organized by the mega-talented John Gall. Each designer is given the title and synopsis of three novels, and must pick one and design a cover for it in a mere 24 hours. Though many of them are top-notch, there are, of course, some that really stand out — we made our choices based on originality, skill, and which covers would make us pick the book off the shelf. Click through to see our ten favorite cover designs from the 30 Covers in 30 Days project, then check out the rest of the designs over at the Office of Letters and Light blog, and let us know whether you agree with our picks in the comments! … Read More
The Eyes Have It: 25 Book Covers That Look Back
It’s summer, which means we’re doing more than our usual amount of bookstore browsing in the many air-conditioned shops in the greater New York area. Of course, half the fun of browsing is coming across books you’ve never heard of and picking them up, usually solely based on the covers, and for some reason we’ve noticed that we’ve been picking up a lot of big blue eyes recently. If eyes are the windows to the soul, as many people with eye tattoos have told us, does that mean we can see a book’s soul through them too? Or is that our own soul being reflected back to us? Maybe neither, but at the very least, we find book covers with eyes rather, okay, eye-catching, which is in many ways the goal of a well-designed jacket. So click through to see 25 well-designed book covers, new and old, that draw us in with their stares, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments! … Read More
Rejected Book Covers vs. The Finished Product
When you’re dealing with the release of a high-profile book, the stakes are high, so it can take an insane number of drafts to get the cover just right for everyone involved. To that point, last week the Sunday Book Review ran a feature on book covers that “got away”; we’ve selected a handful of our favorites from their roundup, and paired them with the covers that ended up making the cut. Click through and let us know in the comments in which cases you agree with the publishers’ decisions. … Read More
Color Comparisons: John Gall x The Sartorialist
If there’s anything we love (nearly) as much as beautiful book covers, it’s pretty ladies in colorful ensembles. Enter ex-pat fashion blogger Sera Hur, who has paired John Gall’s wonderful cover designs for Haruki Murakami’s entire catalog with lovely street style images from the Sartorialist, carefully choosing companion images that match each other in color and tone. We don’t know what it is about these mash-ups that’s so compelling — but whether it’s finding a true thread connecting chronically separate universes, or just the delight of seeing a beloved book represented in the skirt of a girl on the street, we’re hooked. Click through for more images, and get inspired to dress a little better — or at least to read more, in your normal clothes. … Read More
20 Body Part-Covered Book Covers
As a race, we’re totally obsessed with ourselves. Much of our art is about introspection, self-discovery, and self-expression, and we ascribe human characteristics to anything we can — cars, clocks, can openers — whenever we can. So then, to complement what may be the most stereotypically introspective art form — the written word — it makes some amount of sense that graphic designers and artists would go to the body. After all, the more easily and immediately we can subconsciously see ourselves in something, the more we love it (just ask Scott McCloud). But there’s nothing wrong with that. We’re a narcissistic species, and hey, it’s been working for us. Check out our collection of gorgeously designed book covers featuring body parts and revel in your humanity for a… Read More
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