How We Design A Book Cover

Book covers are a mysterious, secret art — they sort of just appear in your lap fully formed when you buy a book.

Published in

ZeroIndent

11 min readNov 19, 2019

So we thought we’d share how we do it.

This is the story of how we came up with the cover and style for Maynard Trigg and The Creature Beneath The Veil and the lessons we learned (and failed to learn) along the way.

“At this stage, as I grew increasingly stir-crazy with the lack of finished product, I threatened my marketing manager to release the damn thing as is — screw the art work, it’s all too hard, Jan!”

Enjoy.

Part One: The Inspiration Phase

The first hurdle every designer has to overcome is having a good idea. Ideas are easy to have, and like empty coffee cups, my desk is always lousy with ones that should be thrown out at the start of any project.

The ideas part always starts with looking at what other folk have done in the past. The glamorous thing to suggest here is that this process exists to identify inspiration: to find stuff you like. This may be true for some. Mostly, the inspiration phase is 90% finding things you think are awful, and 10% finding things you like.

The goal of separating the two is to develop the language to explain and identify why they can be separated. This bit sucks because there are so many fantastic book covers and we kind of wished we’d designed all of them.

We started by creating a pinterest board and slapping down any book covers we thought were cool or represented a design aspect we felt suited what we were aiming toward. And then spent a good deal of time posting covers we hated in Slack and discussing why they sucked eggs.

After adding sixty or seventy ideas (okay, there were actually 339), we ended up looking at a lot of Harry Potter covers.

This wasn’t intentional, they are just everywhere.

After seeing the nineteenth really bad one, I lined up a handful of different designs side by side for two key reasons:

a) we were familiar with the source material so it was an abstract lesson in how illustration and design represents content — and crucially, whether the cover is selling you what the book delivers.

b) the novels are so successful there are endless cover variations to compare and contrast.

Some of the covers we disliked because they failed to capture the attitude and tone of the series. The one just below are very cool designs but feel in-congruent with the books they are trying to represent. Save book 3, The Prisoner of Azkaban, which signals the shift to a more mature palette of themes.

In particular, the Order of The Phoenix is odd. The fifth Harry Potter book is essentially one very long episode of the OC with wizards and Voldemort mixed in, and the Phoenix just doesn’t capture… anything that the book feels like or is about, not to mention it doesn’t exactly grab your attention.

Others we felt were trying a little too hard to be different to what had come before them (though I love the Prisoner of Azkaban and Half Blood Prince covers). Similar to the previous set, these are definitely covers for people who know that the story is about. The Half-Blood Prince does a good job of centralising the relationship between Dumbledore and Harry, as well as the strange and dangerous nature of the story.

We continued to add to the board, until common designs developed.

Key themes emerged, and I knew, at the very least, what I did not want.

From this extensive search and comparison, I jotted down a group of principles that would inform the design process. The principles didn’t end up being exhaustive, but they gave me a place to begin drafting a briefing document.

Design Principles

Simple, block colours where possible
Less is more but not abstract — the less busy the cover, the better it will age
The cover needs to be mysterious and a little sinister
Do not want more than three primary colours
Design must be repeatable for future books in the series

Part Two: Ideation

We knew the title of the book.

Maynard Trigg and The Creature Beneath The Veil.

Beyond that we had no actual ideas for the book cover. Not even a start.

So I hopped on 99 Designs, a website that allows you to present a pitch for art with an attached prize money, and artists can submit drafts and pitches. You choose finalists and a winner who gets the money.

It’s an interesting service that I’d only used once before — I don’t love the economics of artists not getting paid to make things, but a lot of the entries are quick and dirty concepts, exactly what we were after.

The quality and content of the submissions varied wildly due to the vague request I posted: this was the goal.

I ran the top designs by my marketing friend.

This was very nearly the cover, it ticked all our boxes: simple colours, conveyed a lot about the story, but it didn’t feel tonally right. It was almost too fun, or toojovial.

This one is straight up from a free photoshop template online. But we liked the discolouration and distressing around the edges.

Nothing was hitting the mark, but they provided me more negative space: increasingly I was starting to understand what I did not want.

And it reinforced that they key to this cover would be identifying and mining a a simple idea or controlling theme.

While we liked the dark cover with the skyport, it failed to capture the essence of the story.

I asked the people who had read the novel to suggest ideas — in their mind, what could represent the story, what would draw people in to discover this world and this narrative.

We ended up with the following:

“The Seeker is the mystery you want to know about”

I asked my illustrator to do a bunch of doodles of The Seeker and Maynard the skyships, and spent a weekend in Photoshop tooling around with the results.

The resulting covers gave us something to start imagining with

Concept Art that would have been the cover in an alternate universe

I kept sending new ideas to my very frustrated illustrator, and spent the following weeks designing up a few mockups to present to some trusted creative folk to see which ones they liked the most.

At this stage, I wasn’t yet settled on a single “idea” — rather, the goal was to generate as many different designs that represented the dark, mysterious tone of the story, and aligned with the design principles we settled on.

Some favourites we didn’t choose

1. The minimal aesthetic

This was a cool idea. I had this one printed, and it looked amazing on paper. The problem(aside from The Seeker looking a little too much like a Dementor) was that the minimalist style felt somehow incomplete. Rather than compelling the reader to crack open the book and discover this encounter with a horrifying creature, it just felt like it was trying too hard to represent something.

2. The Oil Painting

This style and colouring (and even font) was based on a series of Harry Potter covers. The artwork is beautiful, some of Crystal’s best, but, rather obviously, it didn’t feel like ours. It was good, but it wasn’t my book (the midnight blue one is my favourite version of this style).

3. The Ultimate Chaos

I hate this one with every fibre of my being. it’s so busy it gives me a headache, the colours are weird, the typography is weird… it’s just a lot to look at.

But I also love how much of a how mess it is. Either way, it definitely confirmed that I did not, in fact, want this style.

Part Three: The Idea

Fast forward a month.

All of that said, I still didn’t have an idea for the cover.

I knew the following:

I want the cover to be a single, block, dark colour
I want the cover to feature the Seeker
I want the cover to be easily identifiable as part of the series (i.e. can be repeatable in a meaningful way)

The pinterest just wasn’t doing it for me anymore.

I spent a long time in bookstores just picking up books and holding them under the store lights. I stared at spines and covers and blurbs, hunting for ones that felt right — that felt mysterious but didn’t try too hard — hunting for books that yelled: read me!

I was at a complete loss.

As a much smarter person once suggested: nothing worse than a blank page.

So, with a glass of angry whiskey in hand, I opened up Photoshop, dump filled black, and laid out the words in a font I liked (Garamond, duh).

I knew if the background was black, then we’d need white font, and another primary colour.

I settled on a gold-ish colour that reminded me of copper and rust and age, and one Sunday afternoon, I had a template with a big hole in the middle.

At this stage, as I grew increasingly stir-crazy with the lack of finished product, I threatened my marketing manager to release the damn thing as is — screw the art work, it’s all too hard, Jan!

He very calmly advised I send this template to the illustrator with a vague, mal-formed brief in the hopes she could drag me from design purgatory.

Part Four: The Briefing

Now that I’d settled on a start for the cover (and a visual language), I wrote an emotive, detailed briefing for my illustrator, Crystal Htay. I focused a lot on what I didn’t want, and what I was tonally trying to achieve, and picked a scene I wanted to depict on the cover.

My briefings always include blocking— which is to say the rough shape of the content on the canvas (it is always embarrassing as I have little to no talent with illustration).

Crystal went away, and returned, almost immediately, with something close to a finished product (she is brilliant at this, and must find my endless insistence on taking said finished product and reworking a maddening characteristic).

The finished produced was this cover.

It’s good — but it’s… odd, somehow.

The goal had been to place the Seeker, the cloaked figure, in a shadowy underground chamber.

Crystal rendered a handful of iterations of the background, but they never quite worked.

We had a hard to express problem: the Seeker felt wrong being placed.

I’m still not sure why I know this is the case, it just is.

Something to do with scale.

Something to do with weight.

Something to do with colour and composition.

But it felt closer to a cover than we’d had.

The Seeker design was intimidating, mysterious, and for the first time, cool.

I asked Crystal to send me a .png of just The Seeker.

She did.

I stared at this .png for days at a time.

I tried to decide what to do with it.

I dug up the design I’d use as the back-bone for the colour palette and tried to identify what I was missing. What was the key.

And then, rather obviously, I realised the simplicity of The Opal Sea was underscored by the detail within the circle.

So I popped a circle behind The Seeker, and realised immediately I was on to something.

The circle draws the eye to The Seeker’s hood, and begs the question: who, or what is it? What do they want? Why do they look so dangerous? Is the circle a moon? Where is this set?

Part Five: The Cover

After that, the cover came together in a matter of hours.

I grabbed my texture brushes in Photoshop, slotted in some masking layers, gradients, and added distressing, ware-and-tear and ink stains.

I mixed and matched some colours to ensure there was consistency across the front cover and spine and blurb, and the below cover was born.

I added a circle to the spine, and considered adding The Seeker illustration too, but it got too busy.

Instead, I decided this circle would be the consistent iconography for the series covers.

Each novel in the series would feature the circle, and on a shelf, would line up and look brilliant.

There was some more tweaking once we did some test prints.

Like the decision to bold the heading text for the blurb, and the placement of the ink stain behind the gold text to ensure everything was legible.

In particular, the place of the ink stain on the spine took a long time. I wasn’t sure if it was right until we had a box of ten in our hands, then it was obvious it was perfect.