If you've been to an American bookstore in the past decade, the odds are good that a cover designed by Peter Mendelsund has caught your eye. Despite scant formal training, he has managed to create ...

Among the many challenges book cover designers face is trying to represent a book’s premise or main character without getting so specific that readers are left with little to imagine. A few years ago, ...

Cover to Cover, a new book from Penguin Classics, is the closest I can get to looking at pornography in the office. I’ve stared at it for hours, flipping back and forth between covers I’ve passed a ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about the future of books and the business of storytelling. This article is more than 6 years old. Hiring a general ...

All forms of design serve to communicate meaning in some way, but every genre has to be handled differently, case by case. And so, just like how packaging and product design live in different worlds ...

Despite a steady rise in the popularity of e-books and a surge in ownership of electronic readers and tablets, real dead-tree paper books are not about the exit the scene any time soon. And while most ...

Art historian Alka Pande is multi-tasking. When talking about book cover design in the run-up to the Oxford Bookstore Book Cover Prize announcement anytime this month, she cuts out to handle something ...

We’re all told that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but most of us do! In fact, judging a book by its cover might not be such a bad thing. A cover can help readers get a sense of what a book ...

What makes you pick up a book you’ve never heard of? Is it the title, the author’s name, or the promise of an intriguing story? More often than not, it’s the cover—a single image that has the power to ...

If you’re an author wondering how to create the ideal book cover for your work, deciding between AI-generated designs and professional design services can feel challenging. The book cover is a key ...