I’ve been dis­cussing movie posters and album covers for the past two and a half and two years respec­tively – first on Unzipped and now here on the Font­Feed. Yet book covers only have been cov­ered (lame pun, I know – it’s past mid­night here!) spo­rad­i­cally, mostly when report­ing awards and online gal­leries. Stephen on his part recently did a very pop­u­lar entry on the Book, Jacket & Jour­nal Show.

There have been moments I’ve con­sid­ered start­ing with a reg­u­lar book cover sec­tion, but I don’t think that’s real­is­tic. These type of reviews take a hell of a lot of time to write – posters/covers have to be assem­bled, inserted in the post, links to the respec­tive movie/artist web­sites added, then I have to study them, and write some­thing that makes a mod­icum of sense. I already have to occa­sion­ally skip a month for Screen­fonts and My Type of Music, so it’s safe to say a Book Faces column would only make mat­ters worse.

Excellence in book cover design

For­tu­nately there are a number of places on the inter­net that show­case book covers and offer insight­ful infor­ma­tion about this (com­mer­cial) art. Last Thurs­day a new and valu­able resource was added – The Book Cover Archive was launched, “for the appre­ci­a­tion and cat­e­go­riza­tion of excel­lence in book cover design”. The web­site is edited and main­tained by Ben Pier­att and Eric Jacob­sen, for­merly of Covers. Ben Pier­att, pre­vi­ously a part­ner at Fwis, cur­rently works at full ser­vice design studio Gen­eral Projects. Eric Jacob­sen, also for­merly of Fwis, is both the devel­oper of the site and a valued con­trib­u­tor to the archive and blog.

Ben Pier­att explains that the web­site was cre­ated out of per­sonal interest.

Since appren­tice­ships are out of fash­ion, a resource like this is nec­es­sary for observ­ing the work of, and learn­ing from, the best design­ers in the field; and while there are a number of great book cover blogs already in exis­tence, they’re lim­ited by the amount of time they’re will­ing to spend edi­to­ri­al­iz­ing. Whereas the only edi­to­r­ial deci­sion nec­es­sary for post­ing to the Archive is the binary “it’s in, or it’s not”, which allows us to post more covers more frequently.

Plus, y’know, “Those who can’t, blog.”, which is def­i­nitely true of us for the time being.

Paper­back Books © Julia Freeman-​Woolpert
Although it has only been online for a couple of days it looks like Ben and Eric have hit the ground run­ning. The Book Cover Archive already holds 800+ covers and 180+ design­ers. Up untill now all covers have been added by Ben Pier­att and Eric Jacob­sen them­selves, but they do accept sub­mis­sions (to that effect a sub­mis­sion form is amongst the planned future enhance­ments). I asked Ben Pier­att on what basis covers are selected to be included.

While we con­sider the archive to be a public resource, its pur­pose is self­ish in nature, so the deci­sion to add a cover is ulti­mately a per­sonal one. If it’s not some­thing we enjoy or feel we can learn from, then it’s not going in. That said, the cri­te­ria we work within are fairly uno­rig­i­nal: strong con­cept, sen­si­tive typog­ra­phy, inter­est­ing imagery, and ide­ally a com­bi­na­tion of all three. Though I have to say we tend to be a bit more lax in our judg­ing of any­thing Sci-​Fi related. If it’s not hideous, it’s prob­a­bly going in.

So how does it work? The home page dis­plays the covers sorted by date added. A drop down menu allows for brows­ing by meta data. Fur­ther­more there is a fully brows­able master list of all con­tent, search­able with smart key­word searches. Click­ing a cover opens a ded­i­cated page which holds all the meta data for the cover and a larger image. Vis­i­tors can inter­act on those pages using a custom com­ments system. The edi­tors of The Book Cover Archive have made a sig­nif­i­cant effort to make the cred­its as com­pre­hen­sive as pos­si­ble, yet they realise it is pos­si­ble they have missed the odd con­trib­u­tor. An e-mail link is included on each cover’s page to allow vis­i­tors of the archive to sug­gest edits.

The real strength of the site lays in the cross-​indexed meta data. Click­ing on an author’s name will take you to an overview page with all the books they have in the archive. Click­ing on a designer’s name reveals all the covers by that designer. A single person can have mul­ti­ple instances of meta data asso­ci­ated with their name. For instance, Chip Kidd (unsur­pris­ingly) has the unique honour of being the only person in the archive with every pos­si­ble attri­bu­tion filled: Author, Designer, Art Direc­tor, Pho­tog­ra­pher, and Illustrator.

This is bound to become a bril­liant resource. Ben Pier­att and Eric Jacob­sen claim they’re invested in this thing for the long haul, so check back often for a steady stream of improve­ments and addi­tions. And The Book Cover Archive doesn’t just list book covers, it also sports an accom­pa­ny­ing blog. Fur­ther­more the web­site includes links for port­fo­lio sites of book cover design­ers, as well as other web­sites on book cover design. The web­site is under con­stant devel­op­ment – its cre­ators call it a “Steady Beta”. Most of the fea­tures already have been imple­mented, but there are still some very inter­est­ing future enhance­ments to the archive coming up:

• Book Descriptions
• Tags
• Mul­ti­ple Images per Book
• Type­face Identification (!) :)
• Sub­mis­sion form
• Expanded Designer Profiles
• Sitemap

Tags: book covers, book design