The Book Cover Trend of Text on Old Paintings(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
The Book Cover Trend of Text on Old Paintings
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/books/review/book-cover-trends.html
13 comments
https://archive.ph/wFgG5
Publishers will pay a graphic designer a few hundred dollars for a cover and aren't willing to spend for photography or original art, so this is what you get: images in the public domain.
A forever trend for classical music album covers.
Greatly done by Standard Ebooks too, I guess for the aesthetic as well as for old paintings being in public domain.
Standard Ebooks does it better.
The article claims that "“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (2019) might be the trailblazer for this century’s spate.". Well, according to the wayback machine, standard ebooks was doing it in 2015.
Standard ebooks have a black rectangle near the bottom with the title and author in white text. Very legible regardless of the painting colors, color blindness, etc.
Most of the examples in the article, the colors hurt my eyes. That's not a figure of speech, my eyes hurt looking at hot pink over grey. On some of them, the text is placed without regard to the background picture so the forground/background contrast is all over the place. "Dream State" is tasteful with the sky extended and the text subtly behind the mountain. Most of these look like they hired somebody off fiver; somebody got paid $5 for 5 minutes of work.
The article claims that "“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (2019) might be the trailblazer for this century’s spate.". Well, according to the wayback machine, standard ebooks was doing it in 2015.
Standard ebooks have a black rectangle near the bottom with the title and author in white text. Very legible regardless of the painting colors, color blindness, etc.
Most of the examples in the article, the colors hurt my eyes. That's not a figure of speech, my eyes hurt looking at hot pink over grey. On some of them, the text is placed without regard to the background picture so the forground/background contrast is all over the place. "Dream State" is tasteful with the sky extended and the text subtly behind the mountain. Most of these look like they hired somebody off fiver; somebody got paid $5 for 5 minutes of work.
The thing that bothers me about this trend is that, for the most part, only details of paintings are used. To me, a cropped detail never looks complete. It is like a book missing half its chapters.
“I intentionally avoided showing the full crop to keep a sense of mystery,” Siripant wrote in an email. “Publishers often favor this approach so readers can envision the character in their own way.”
Of all the book cover design trends, I think I like this one the best. I certainly prefer it to blobby illustrations or poor imitations of Saul Bass. I wonder what the next trend will be!
Being that I don't judge books by their covers, I don't really have a strong opinion on these trends. I do have, however, a very strong visceral repulsion to a few of the covers presented here. They are fugly as heck:
- "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" looks like the first time I discovered background images and `<font color=""></font>`. The title, of all things, is unreadable with that color. I googled and there are better versions (still with the pink color scheme, mind you) of this cover.
- "Disappoint Me" (or should it be written "DISAPPOINT ME"?) looks like the first time someone made a meme after they learned how to lasso-cut a portion of an image into a new layer. There is, again, that poisonous pink that does readability no favors. FWIW, it has successfully disappointed me indeed. There seems to be a version of the book that doesn't fit this trend but reads so much better.
- "Seduction Theory" I'm glad Clippy seems to have found a job at graphic design after that long stint as an office assistant. Alas, old habits die hard, I guess. Unfortunately, neither the Brush Script MT(-esque) label telling me it is a novel nor the Word Art effects give a seductive mood. It gives a very puberty vibe, however, as it reminds me when I designed the Christmas Party poster in my freshman year, and pop has just upgraded the family computer to MS Office 2003.
- "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" looks like the first time I discovered background images and `<font color=""></font>`. The title, of all things, is unreadable with that color. I googled and there are better versions (still with the pink color scheme, mind you) of this cover.
- "Disappoint Me" (or should it be written "DISAPPOINT ME"?) looks like the first time someone made a meme after they learned how to lasso-cut a portion of an image into a new layer. There is, again, that poisonous pink that does readability no favors. FWIW, it has successfully disappointed me indeed. There seems to be a version of the book that doesn't fit this trend but reads so much better.
- "Seduction Theory" I'm glad Clippy seems to have found a job at graphic design after that long stint as an office assistant. Alas, old habits die hard, I guess. Unfortunately, neither the Brush Script MT(-esque) label telling me it is a novel nor the Word Art effects give a seductive mood. It gives a very puberty vibe, however, as it reminds me when I designed the Christmas Party poster in my freshman year, and pop has just upgraded the family computer to MS Office 2003.
> Being that I don't judge books by their covers, I don't really have a strong opinion on these trends.
What do you think the purpose of covers is then?
What do you think the purpose of covers is then?
Austere bas relief gold print on cloth covers.
This is a good way for these books to signal what they are like to their readership (bad).
love the juxtaposition! beautiful paintings with hideous typography on top