Book cover design & book illustration

As the old adage goes, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover but as illustration agents, we really have to disagree on this one. The reality is that we're very often drawn to a book and choose to pick it up because of its cover. In fact, with the books we hold dearest, we even memorise them with a visual of their book cover design. It becomes a distillation, a wrapper for the content of the entire book - an evocation of the story, its characters and themes. Book illustration and book cover design is rooted in the skill of translating complex ideas and themes into easy to interpret, aesthetically pleasing imagery.

You know the feeling when you’re at an airport or at a bookshop, confronted by a wall of exciting options - authors you know and love, titles you might have heard about on the grapevine. Your eyes instinctively seek out something that speaks to you, grabs your attention and invites you to pick it up for further consideration - maybe even make that critical decision to take it to the till before diving into it during your next holiday or on your daily commute.

Image and colour choices can communicate a book’s genre and relevance to the viewer. A book’s cover design combines the elements of typography, layout, image and copy, including on the spine and back cover. The familiar Z-format book cover illustration is a tried and tested way to quickly convey the key information of title, author and visual.

Once the cover design makes the necessary impression, the blurb and reviews on the back cover help someone take that next step to commit to the book. Book illustration can play a role here too, bringing life and colour to the copy-heavy back cover. Publishers often give artists a lot of creative freedom and an open brief, allowing them to interpret the story with their own ideas. Authors and publishers may put together the brief for the artist, but are often open their own interpretation and translation of story to image.

In some cases, the publisher may also want to collate a series of books, say for example by the same author or into a theme, or an update to well-known classic titles. In this case, the illustrator is tasked with interpreting the disparate stories into a cohesive series with an aesthetic consistency and unified presentation - giving them a sort of brand identity to make a powerful impact on the shelf. Whether reimagining an old classic to give it a new identity or updated feel, responding to cultural phenomena such as a major film release, or trying to make an impact with a new publication, book cover design and book illustration plays such an important role. Distilling the thousands of words within into a single image is an art and takes a skilled, experienced illustrator to execute. Here are some of the past projects our illustrators have worked on - maybe you have spotted some of these books on your travels, too?