Blog

Lately I’ve been a little obsessed with book covers, and according to Dr. Internet I’m not the only one.  Bloggers, new organizations, and artists all have something to say about book covers.

We design around 10-12 book covers a year, but a lot of potential covers wind up on the cutting room floor, so we see a lot more than that in the course of the year. A lot more. Each cover goes through several design stages, headed up by the Art Director (who can tell you a little bit more about her personal design process here). And just to give you some idea of what that process actually looks like in practice, we wanted to take a second to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the cover design process for The Look Book: 50 Iconic Beauties and How to Achieve their Signature Looks.

For The Look Book we wanted a cover that felt classic and looked beautiful. We decided to feature some of the famous faces from the book on the cover to show readers that the book includes nearly equal parts historical info and beauty how-to’s. Here are some of the early ideas we came up with.

After taking a look at these versions of the cover, we felt that we should simplify it and go with one image—something we hoped would be classic, mature, and recognizable. That helped us narrow it down to two choices: Mia Farrow and Bette Davis.

After playing around with those images a bit, adding color accents, different fonts, etc., we decided to go with Mia Farrow.

Once the image was decided it was time to play around with fonts, colors, and layout.

And after all those rounds of changes we came up with the final cover, which you can see below.

No book cover is perfect (although some come pretty darn close!) but we think this final version of the cover is eye-catching, classy, and sophisticated. It represents both the historical and how-to aspects of the book (Vidal Sassoon is actually cutting Mia Farrow’s hair on the cover—how more how-to does it get?!) and the colorful accents keep it reader-friendly and fun.

Share your thoughts in the comments section! Is this the cover you would have chosen? Which of the previous versions is your favorite? Would you have gone a completely different direction? Tell us what you think!

• 

by Zest Books / BLOG