Design
Cover design: a commercial object first, a piece of art second.
A cover has one job before any other — to make the right reader stop. Everything else it does is secondary to that, and most covers fail because the order gets reversed.
What this is
We design covers against the shelf they will sit on, physical or digital. That means studying what the category signals to its readers, then deciding deliberately whether to meet that expectation or break it. It also means testing at the size the cover is actually first seen: a thumbnail on a phone, next to eleven competitors.
A cover that looks striking at full size and turns to mud at 120 pixels has not been designed, it has been decorated.
Book Cover Design
What you get
What book cover design actually delivers
Thumbnail-tested
Every concept reviewed at retail thumbnail size before it is developed, because that is where the buying decision starts.
Category-literate
Designed with an understanding of what your category's readers expect, so the book signals what it is in half a second.
Full wrap, not just the front
Spine and back cover designed together with the front, with the spine width calculated for the real page count and paper stock.
Typography that survives
Title treatment that stays legible small, prints cleanly, and does not rely on an effect that falls apart in CMYK.
Production-ready files
Print-ready with correct bleed and colour profile, plus the digital sizes each retail channel requires.
How it runs
The process, stage by stage.
Each stage finishes before the next begins, and you see the work at the points where your decision changes what happens next.
Brief
The book, the reader, the category, the comparable titles you admire and the ones you do not.
Concepts
Distinct directions — genuinely different approaches, not one idea in three colours.
Thumbnail review
Concepts assessed small before refinement, with our honest commercial read on each.
Refinement
The chosen direction developed through typography, imagery and colour to a finished front cover.
Full wrap and files
Spine and back completed once the page count is fixed, and all output files produced.
Questions
About book cover design
Enough to make a real choice between different ideas, with revision rounds on the direction you pick. The exact numbers are set out in your quote.
Yes, provided you hold the rights to use it commercially. We will tell you honestly whether it will work at cover size and in print.
You receive the rights to use the finished cover for your book. Licensing terms for any stock or commissioned imagery within it are set out in writing, because those licences have their own limits.
Then we have misread the brief, and we go back to it. That conversation is part of the process, not an extra.
Related
Often needed alongside this
Book Formatting
Readers rarely notice good typesetting. They notice bad typesetting constantly, without being able to name what is…
Learn moreChildren's Book Illustration
Picture book illustration is a discipline, not a style. The order the work is done in matters as much as the…
Learn moreAuthor Branding
Books are individual projects. An author career is the thing they add up to — and readers who liked the last one need…
Learn more