I’ve always believed a couple of fairly obvious book design axioms:
1. Book cover design is essentially package design.
As with soup, or cereal or any product sold via shelf or photo, the outside must dramatize the inside and resonate with the customer in some way.
2. The task and the joy of a designer packaging your ideas in your book is to find a balance between fashion and originality.
You must look up-to-date, familiar, popular—Fashion, and yet stand out, not look like everybody else—Originality.
Color is clearly a key element in this process. But how to select a palette for each book cover project?
Beyond the obvious markers of feminine vs. masculine, adult vs. juvenile, whimsical vs. serious, one has to choose from a dizzying array of color scheme possibilities.
To know what the reading/buying public thinks of as up-to-date and familiar, authors, publishers and designers are wise to keep an eye on color trends in all design categories: Fashion and home decor lead the way here. What we all tend to “like” is determined far more than we realize by what the NY and Paris folks decided a couple of years ago!
Current color palettes are before us every day in the latest J. Crew catalog, the local Pottery Barn and even your favorite eatery, think Starbucks and Panera among others.
Future color trends are rather mysteriously assembled, then sort of dictated by the clothing and home fashion folks, but worth monitoring.
This is just one website exploring the near future of color:
Pantone Fashion Color Report- Summer 2010
It includes an interesting
PDF download of Pantone’s (the design industry color monolith) Spring 2010 color forecast.
Some color scheme creation tools:
