Wednesday Blog Watch: Book Cover Design Blogs

This week let's look at a few blogs that focus on book cover design. The Book Design Review, written by Joseph Sullivan, is one of our favorites, and in the past he has covered the controversial cover for Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution.
Caustic Cover Critic is another excellent book cover blog, and though not often exceedingly caustic, does have a fun "awful" section (Thankfully, no MIT Press covers are in that section so far!).
Another cover blog, Judge a Book by its Cover explains:

I work in a public library. I see literally thousands of books every week; the good, the bad, and the truly hideous. These are the covers from the latter category.

Indeed most of the cover designs shown in that blog (the "Phallic Phriday" section is a good place to start) do seem to be rather hideous. Again, we're glad not to see any MIT Press books...
The Première de couverture blog, a bit more scholarly, is written by a bookseller about "the fascinating world of book cover design". In a post about British vs. American design, "Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century", he mentions the design of The Future of Europe. Incidentally (as we learned from the blog), première de couverture is the French term for the front cover of a book.

Comments

[Stephen Tiano]

The thing about book design generally, and cover design in particular, is keeping the balance between unique enough to attract potential readers, but not so much as to distract the reader from reading the book.

I invite you to take a gander at my blog on book design and layout, and freelancing in that sphere. It's at http://www.tianodesign.com/blog. Feel free to add it to your blogroll, as I'll be adding yours to mine later today.