Using a Natural Approach to Cover Design

Warning: In-Depth article about my process

A long, long time ago, Leonardo DaVinci was absorbed in a study of proportion in the Natural World and how it applied to our lives. One such sketchpad figure from his work at the time he titled "Vitruvian Man" to signify that proportion is important in our lives. Much later, there was an important mid-20th Century school of architecture and design, the brainchild of Swiss-French architect and designer Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, (better known as Le Corbusier) which at its root broke all design proportions down into fifths, corresponding to the five element of the human form: arms, legs and head or four fingers and thumb. Because that is how we’re laid out, he intuited, we would be most comfortable living with and viewing designs which incorporate proportions that divide space into five parts.

I don’t know if he was academically “right” or not, but page layouts along those kinds of line intersections seem to “work” better than others to my eye, at least. If it works for me, it may work for you as well. I’ve trained my eyes, over the years, to divide a page (or book cover) up using five lines: three horizontal and two vertical. They don’t have to be exact, but should be visually equally spaced, like this:

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Of course, the idea is NOT to fill all these intersections up with boxed content! The idea is to set up natural alignments of all the necessary elements within a cover design. Some of the individual elements may also contain focal points in your background photo or illustrated image, or suggested movement. Look inside a potential photo or illustration for these elements of movement, eye attraction and suggested emotion, as they are all areas you can use to strengthen and reinforce your marketing message.

Consider also the natural eye movements of readers. Most of them have eyes that move much like your own, naturally, across divided space.

Natural eye movements? Again, there have been lots of studies of how a reader’s eyes move when scanning a printed page with photographic and graphics elements in combination with headlines and text. These studies have been the basis for many years of the science of ad placement. Exploiting these findings improves the effectiveness of ad design as well. It seems that with few exceptions, peoples’ eyes travel a repeatable and predictable path when viewing a composite page. The average eye circles a page (your book cover) in two ways. The primary circle will be clockwise, middle left, up and around, ending at the top right after a full revolution. The secondary is counter clockwise, starting at the bottom right and circling around to end at the top left. The primary is the one where the most important information is absorbed, and the secondary is the follow-up for remaining information. It makes an ad more effective (your book cover) to take advantage of this phenomenon, or at least to manipulate it to your own uses in holding the viewer’s eye upon the page as long as you can. Make ‘em comfortable before you sneak up behind them with the book pitch to end all pitches! Shatter their resistance gently, but firmly.

Combining all the useful elements at our disposal into an effective cover is our goal. A cover with these kept in mind will be more effective, because it will tie-in to the reader’s mind and emotions naturally – not in an awkward, contrived way which sets up its own conflicts. Another way I’ve heard this expressed is, “never give them the opportunity to answer: No.”

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Design Color Points from Nature for more easily predicted reactions...

When designing a book cover, don’t make the mistake of minimizing the importance of color. Color adds important elements to your cover and reactions in the reader all by itself. The intelligent use of color will help elicit the intended response in your cover’s reader. Most of these reactions are natural and predictable, as their basis is nature itself. A splash of well-chosen color will draw the reader’s eye into the image much better than the suggestion of applicable language alone will. Many of the responses we exhibit to specific color come directly from nature.

Yellow animals, for the most part, are dangerous to humans, including Yellowjacket wasps, sea snakes and poison dart frogs (if there are any left in the wild…) among others. The use of striped yellow and black on barriers for protection is not just by chance. The combination means DANGER, subconsciously, and it seems to be hardwired into our genetics. Color is an integral part of how our emotions are connected to our conscious thought. There are color-relationships that have been proven in behavioral studies that you can use effectively in your choices.

Red, for example, is connected with excitement and alarm. Blue with serenity and sleep. Green is, naturally, connected with healing and growth. One of my favorite examples of color use is how often the walls in maximum security psychiatric prisons are painted a soft shade of pink! Pink seems to calm us, and is one of the most non-confrontational colors.

When approaching a color choice for your cover, first try to summarize the mood of your work. How do you want the reader to feel when reading it? Is there a specific emotion that your book revolves around – an emotional “glue”? Once you’ve determined what that is, you can choose from images, and design elements that will help communicate this instantly to the reader. The right elements will enhance and reinforce your title more memorably than the words alone. Emotional nuance is often better expressed in images or color and contrast than in words alone.

If there will be illustrative material behind the typography, keep it played down, creating contrast between the two elements – so that it won’t affect the legibility of the title, unless that is your intent. The point is – don’t leave anything up to chance here. Control every step along the way.

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Adding Conflict with Contrast...

One of the easiest ways to add a sense of conflict to a cover design is by creating areas of extreme contrast within the layout. These might include large size differences of elements, extreme color contrasts or the use of display typography in contrast to other elements or to itself.

An exercise:

Look through covers and book jackets in your own bookshelves, a bookstore or library and set aside the six or so that are instantly exciting and attention grabbing. Additionally, they should be in a genre that you enjoy reading. Now, with your notepad, quickly jot down the first three things that come to your mind when viewing these, one-by-one. The title or author’s name doesn’t count right now. Although the importance of recognition and/or “branding” can’t be dismissed, what we’re trying to do here is train your eye to see the emotional content of an overall cover design. The most effective covers – some of Elmore Leonard’s covers come to mind – are the ones with a heightened sense of emotion, conflict, or danger. This can be achieved most effectively with the least number of individual elements. Sometimes a large title typographic element paired with a small, but significant photographic or illustrative element placed for contrast and conflict will draw the reader’s eye and hold it as they figure out the image’s connection with the rest of the cover.

Set your notes aside, then come back to them later, and see if you’ve written down the same “feelings” for more than a couple of your chosen covers. If that is the case, then, for you, those covers have effectively done what the designer intended.

In general, when someone sees two similar items in images, the one that is a darker range of color will seem closer than the lighter colored item on a medium background. Careful manipulation of the dark-to-light contrast within a cover design can bring additional impact to even the simplest design. Look for examples of this in the covers you find most appealing, and think about how this might be used to add clues of emotion or actual content within your book. The way light works across contrasting colors or textures can trick the eye into seeing motion which can lead to specific feelings within a reader looking at your book. A good design will exploit these possibilities to fire up the readers interest in what you’re telling them through the cover.

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The Letter-perfect Cover design...

Having trained your eye to begin to separate out the elements of movement, contrast and color we finally move into the realm of Title and Author’s Name. Typography is a tricky subject. It involves both our emotional responses and our analytical thinking. Letterforms vary not just in size and shape. They are each small graphic elements that contain intentional stresses and suggest certain emotional responses in addition to their utility as carriers of language.

Find a site online which sells typography – fonts.com is one I use – and browse through some examples of display fonts (as opposed to text fonts). Most sites will have typography pages that show entire fonts (all the letters, numbers and characters) Some of these will be extremely ornate – overpowering the eye unless used in very short, concise headlines or titles. If a type face design is very complicated, graphically, it has the tendency to confuse the eye, or lead it in too many directions – if confusion is your goal, this might work well for your cover – assuming a very simple title, of course.

There will be many others which are much simpler – very subtle stroke variations in the “thicks” and “thins”, called stresses by type designers, that lend emotion and movement while still remaining primarily legible – even in smaller sizes. These are the fonts you will probably find most useful. Some of these, like the sans-serif font (no little feet on the ends of ascenders or descenders or along the baseline), Machine, can be very powerful in establishing high-contrast and conflict, based upon their ponderous letterforms. Others, such as Eras, or the font I use in my cover for The Red Gate, Papyrus, are very subtle, open type designs that convey a very different emotional content.

Some fonts are almost serene – but you would probably not want to use these in titling an urban-disaster-themed novel, or an auto-mechanics do-it-yourself book, unless you were seeking to insert another emotional element: humor. Humor can also be an effective element. Also a very fine-line, or graphically busy font would not work effectively when overlaid atop a busy, or complex cover image, as the eye would have difficulty focusing in on specific elements when all are fighting for supremacy.

As you can see the choice of typography to convey a desired emotion is very subjective, yet if you “get it” when looking at a font, the chances are that the type designer did their work well, so if it works for you, chances are it will work for your readers, too.

Letter & Line Spacing Issues...

You’ve got your title, pared own to its most memorable essence, of course. You have chosen a color to predominate, based upon how you want your reader’s attention grabbed, Now you have to put the title on the background graphic. Alignment and legibility are everything.

Party of the alignment issue is how each letterform relates to its neighbors, above, below and side-by-side. The spacing between letters and between lines can be adjusted beyond the standard spacing written into the font. Tweaking the letter-spacing can be very effective if you are working with a condensed font – a narrow style. Tweaking the inter-letter spacing by opening it up without creating visual “holes” requires finesse, but it can make a hard-to-read title much more legible. Just don’t open it up so much that you see primarily “letters” not the word.

Another technique on heavy, compact fonts (wider, more ponderous) is to reduce the inter letter spacing, even overlapping letters slightly, especially where round letter forms meet. It just requires that you finesse the space individually – which might require you to convert the type to curves in your layout/design program, so that individual letters can be moved along the baseline individually. This letter-by-letter approach is called “kerning” a font, depending upon size, for best legibility and fewest visual holes in a headline, or in text. If you’re doing this yourself, since your title is probably not too long, it won’t be that hard a job to get the best inter-letter spacing you can achieve. Be sure to get back, away from your monitor a few times during the process, to check overall legibility and to make sure than you haven’t stacked up the letters to favor one side of a word!

Line spacing, is handled in a similar way, but here, the reverse is true in spacing considerations: the narrower the font, the less interline spacing is required visually, although if you use lower case letters in your title, you’ll have to consider ascenders and descenders in multiple-line titling.

You must adjust the spacing to make sure that the portions above and below the baselines don’t interfere with letters on the next line enough to affect their legibility or break the flow, unless you want that to be a conscious, graphic decision. You may have a specific need to jog the letters off their baselines a bit. This is one way to create a panicked, conflicted feeling in a title graphic. The appearance of kidnappers’ ransom notes, made up of individual letters cut from magazine headlines comes to mind. If this kind of approach works with the “glue” holding your cover together, then use it, but remember: too much of a good thing is a bad thing – keep it legible.

Next, you’ll apply the same principles to the way your name or pen-name appears on the cover. Unless you have an established brand with your name being the most compelling element on the cover, place your name below the title, both physically and in size. If you need a subhead or a descriptive tag line, consider its placement carefully. Adding more typography to the cover might dilute your design, damaging its impact. Maybe re-thinking the title is a better idea. If not, at least make sure that in assigning its position to the cover page, it “belongs” visually to the title as a relationship in space, and your name remains its own focal point.

It’s all about Relationships...

In the vector program I use, a nice refinement is the ability to group objects so their interrelationships are locked in place, allowing you to move the object elements as a unit, apart from the background. This allows you to experiment with different locations on the cover for the best results. You can also use the “duplicate” function to duplicate your titling and authors name and test other type fonts while keeping the relationships constant. When I’ve got a project, I try to offer at least six different font choices in this way, once the interrelationships are worked out. Don’t be afraid to move some of these elements off to the sidelines while you work on each element individually. When you save the graphic file, chances are you’ll also be saving the empty or not-so-empty space nearby as well, for future tweaking. Just be sure, when you have finally decided on your design, to delete all of these in the final file or rename the final file in some way you can remember, such as “bookcover-workingfile”.

Vertical alignment is the final key to good cover typography. If you set up your typography, within your program to “align” left, you’re not finished yet. In headline sizes, the letter alignments within the font may not be the best possible solution. This is true also for right alignments as well, but personally, as right alignments lead the eye off the page, I don’t usually consider that for a book cover. You want to hold them for a while. But rules exist to be broken...

One situation where a right-aligned title might be effective would be if, say “speed” is your book’s “glue” – rushing their eyes through the cover might support the content for specific readers, but it wouldn’t work as well, say for a family saga. A centered alignment may be best here, if stability and substance is the idea you wish to communicate. A centered type design does not usually convey any conflict, unless the type consists of several lines and they are sized differently, or jogged a bit right or left.

The key to vertical alignment whether it’s separate lines of typography or title and authors name, is to find the strengths of the letter forms and connected graphic elements and use them. What I mean here, is to use them to create a visual unit. The relationships of the typography must connect visually, to hold the eye better. On my cover, for example, you’ll notice that the author’s name doesn’t align at the left with the left end of the top of the “T”, but with the T’s ascender. That’s because in this size, the ascender has the stronger movement, and aligning my name with the ascender hold the eye better. When in doubt, experiment. You shouldn’t see the underlying rule of fives grid as anything more than a suggested framework upon which to work. Your title typography and other elements may align best off the grid, for a specific effect, or for an intended conflict. Don’t be afraid to throw out the rules, at least once for every cover, just to pose possibilities – even if it ends up just an example of where you don’t want to go.