Lazy Design
Several weeks ago J. mentioned lazy design and I’m still obsessing over it. What makes a book cover designer lazy? Obviously a book cover can be simple but very lovely. What about this book? Lazy or lovely?
I have no idea who the designer is.
Comments:
Hmmm.… I’m inclined to say lazy. The typography is just blah. I do like the photograph, but that block of orangy-yellow annoys me. Could have been so much more, I think.
What a strange and ineffective placement of type. They’re just in little useless clusters. and don’t really do anything. And all but the title are lowercased, for no particular reason!
My instinct would be to run “Cottage for Sale” across the top, centered, put the asterix in superior, then run “must be moved” flush right, since it’s critical to the title. You could probably do anything with the subtitle..
Well, my definition of “lazy design” is when the final solution is just an obvious literal translation of what’s inside - no wit, no intrigue - nothing to get you to pick it up because you want to know more about the subject.
Now obviously there are different parameters when designing nonfiction, but I still believe you don’t have to give it all away, and if you do, at least make it visually interesting.
As for the “Cottage for Sale” cover, it took a photograph that is already a bit dull and put it in a layout that is uninspired and with clunky typography (why is “Cottage” the only capitalized word?). And that huge yellow bar is distracting my eye away from the photograph and title.
Maybe not so much “lazy” design as boring and uninspired - but it still doesn’t seem like much thought went into it.
The orange bar: yuck, just yuck.
I’m not a designer but if I were doing the cover I’d use a more “newspapery” typeface than the crummy-typewriter typeface. And I’d use a more coordinating typeface for the subtitle.
And I’d have a sharper, black and white photo of the cottage (and is THAT the actual cottage? If it were, I wouldn’t buy it…)
And I’d make the blocks of text line up more, or be more blocky, or something…this just looks like words sprinkled all over the page.
I don’t know. Lazy, maybe. Ugly, certainly, to me at least.
I agree with J’s definition of lazy design. In looking at the case in point today, though, I don’t find the design lazy. The concept is fun, the typography is weak, the overall impact is just so-so. Too bad…the cover is average when it could have been great.
Thanks guys! This may sound stupid but your input helps me to see particular design aspects that I wouldn’t normally “see” and hopefully be a good designer one day.
Hi Dean! You haven’t commented in awhile. Please stick around.
Lazy type — especially as there are several weights of Trixie that can be kind of mixed and matched so that it has a more spontaneous feel to it.
I don’t object to the orange, though the subtitle should have simply been axed: it’s inelegant and cluttering. It makes “*must be moved” lose its impact.
It looks very uninspired to me. I’m wondering if this is the final design? Has anyone seen the actual book? I’ve found that all too often, Amazon ends up with pre-release, fpo cover images that aren’t true to the final printed book (and for some reason they are rarely updated). Viewing book covers this way can be frustrating for designers. Special treatments like metallic inks, spot UV, embossing/debossing are never represented well online. Long live bookstores!
Todd, you’re right about this. We’ve seen one of our books on Amazon that was NOT the final design.
The font is meant to mimic a want-ad, that is also the reason only Cottage is capitalized - the author’s name is in the same font, tying her in with the title. Using the different font on the strapline, ensures a clear line between the ad and its associative elements and the copy description. The orange is pulled off the door. It does stand out on a website. The other choices (blue or gray) would not have worked so well. Also, that orange is something a broadsheet newspaper could reproduce.…again tying back to the ‘want ad’ theme. Chances are the designer was given a very limited choice of images (how many houses on wheels could you find in a day??) and had to work with it. I think it’s well thought out. It’s not lazy…it’s just obvious and works with the book’s content. Also, don’t always blame the designer. Quite often he/she is simply given elements to “work with” - good or bad.
Hi Cat, don’t worry, I don’t think that any of us “blame the designer.” All of us have had to work with authors, editors, and production people who haven’t a clue and dictated to the nth degree how a cover would look.
The designer must take some of the blame (or “responsbility” if that’s a more PC term) for how a cover turns out. Yes, there are times when you have to put lipstick on a pig, but you can still do it in a creative way.
As I wrote before, it’s not so much a lazy design as it is a boring and uninspired one, and though the author, sales, marketing, editorial, art directors and other sundry departments can dictate and bind your design decisions, it’s still up to the designer to come up with a unique and interesting solution.
As the editor of Cottage for Sale—who came upon this blog while searching for a particular review of the book—I’ve found this discussion interesting. This jacket design probably had more worry and work put into it than any other project I’ve worked on.
With trade books, of course, we’re always trying to find the right cover for the right book: what’s attractive to the reader on the shelf? what ties in well with the book’s content?
This book posed particular challenges for us. We wanted readers to grab the book from a shelf or pile in the bookstore, but we also wanted it to “say” what the book is about—a memoir of a woman who bought a sorry-looking cottage and “married” it to her existing cottage. We went through idea after idea for the cover, left one designer in favor of another, and saw dozens of comps. We looked at paintings of cottages and at stock photo images of cottages. The designer tried any number of different fonts. But we kept coming back to the sorry photo of the cottage, as it’s the truest, most honest image of what the book’s about.
Amanda, in her comments above, noted that the Trixie font mimics want-ad type, and that’s exactly the point: Kate Whouley found the cottage in a Pennysaver ad. The same image just didn’t “work” with other fonts. And, interestingly, we tried different fonts and different alignments for the type—some of which were suggested in the comments above. Of what we saw, this worked best. Have we ever wondered whether anything else might work better? Yes, of course. We worried a lot.
Happily, readers and booksellers have generally loved the jacket—in fact, the book as a whole. The publicity firm we hired to handle the book took on the project because they loved the jacket so much. And at the publication party, the design looked great on a cake!
As an editor, I’d argue that you can’t really judge a design from an image on the Web. You miss the tactile experience; you can’t see how the whole package—design, illustrations, content—fits together.
I hope you will all go buy the book so you can assess the design—and the great story—”in person”!
Thanks for posting, Penny!
I guess what still bothers me the most about the cover is that it has that typewriter font. When was the last time you’ve seen a classified ad type written?
I can’t remember the last time I saw ANYTHING typewritten. But if we want to get literal, then perhaps the person placing the ‘for sale’ ad used an old Royal to submit the copy? Probably just the thing you would find lying around in that old cottage.
Similarly, I did a cover which had the word ‘hotline’ in the title, and used an image of an old rotary-dial, red phone — of course nobody uses those anymore — but if you were asked what a ‘hotline’ looked like, what would you think of?
I don’t think this cover is so terrible, but agree the sub-title could have been dropped.
Perhaps one of your re-design challenges is in order?
If only the author had held onto that ad. That would have had real possibilities, and a rare moment of truth in jacket design.
Perhaps one of your re-design challenges is in order?
That sounds excellent.
But, uh, maybe we could make the stakes more interesting this time, just so that we don’t go making a lot of comps for a major publisher for free? Considering that most of us are professionals who don’t have a lot of time . . .
Glad the cover looks good on a cake, but it’s still a dull, bland cover (imho)…
I’m glad you posted, Penny. It confirmed my suspicions that this cover was the result of too many people second-guessing the design, and it looks like an approval-by-committee default cover. Trust me, I’ve been there (and have been pained at the results)!
I also think that if the ONLY way the cover can work is if you hold it in your hands (or “buy” it, as you mentioned), then it’s not a completely successful solution.
What do you have in mind Evan?
J.—Giles and I call this “design by committee.”
Design by committee - man, it has killed so many good covers, it makes me want to cry.
The solution that Viking came up with for this was the result of “design by commitee.” The covers submitted by other designers and myself were so much better than the one they picked, but the editors/marketing/sales dept., overthought the design to the point that they went with this “winner”.
Oy!
Eeewwwwwww!
Complete with punctuation error!
What punctuation error??
Shouldn’t possessive after noun ending with ’s’ just be an apostrophe, not ” ’s ” ?
Just for grins, here are some of the rejected “Olivia” covers I did. Not Chip Kidd exactly, but better than what they published!
Olivia #1
Olivia #2
Olivia #3
Olivia #4
Olivia #5
Oh well.…
Not according to the Chicago Manual of Style!
One more thing: They’re just rough proofs - so the “grammar police” can take five!
Hmm, how embarrassing. I checked “The Elements of Style” but either I mis-read it or there’s a cross-border thingy going on here…
(It’s getting a little scary to post, maybe I should just get back to work!)
I don’t have any lucrative masterplan, I just think if we do something, it should be used. We’ve all done work before. This is a major publisher, it doesn’t make sense to give them design ideas for free.
Evan,
Commonwealth Editions is a small company that has really worked hard to promote this title.
However, if you do think that this resembles “spec” work too closely then I certainly respect that. I think that this redesign is really just for us and not for Commonwealth or any other publisher.
Of course, if any art director or production manager hung around here often enough they’d stumble upon a pretty good designer (or two or three!)
To me, this is not spec work. The publisher didn’t ask for it, nor will they use it (and they aren’t a “major publisher”).
It’s just a fun little exercise like the Flannery O’Connor thing we did earlier. And time willing, I might post a design!
From the other thread:
Commonwealth Editions is a small company that has really worked hard to promote this title.
However, if you do think that this resembles “spec” work too closely then I certainly respect that. I think that this redesign is really just for us and not for Commonwealth or any other publisher.
Of course, if any art director or production manager hung around here often enough they’d stumble upon a pretty good designer (or two or three!)
Sounds good to me.
OK. See you all next Friday. I’ve got work to do!
Recently read Cottage For Sale, it’s an awesome read.
I don’t see a problem with the cover (I must lack that gay designer gene) it fits the story.
Gosh, all of this time I thought my sharpened aesthetic sense was due to my years of study and work. Who knew it was because I have the “gay designer gene”! That’ll be news to my wife!
If you like the cover, fine - but please don’t be offensive with your misguided stereotypes.
Gosh, rumpmaster no need to take it personal.
“Rumpmaster”… nice…
What a twit…