Wednesday 2 December 2009

Amazon Does Covers

I'm no big fan of Amazon, but I was interested to see them running a public vote on the best book covers of 2009 (here, although the link seems not to work half the time), which included a number of covers new to me. So here are some of those I hadn't seen before, which I also really like.


Design by Alison Forner for Padgett Powell's novel The Interrogative Mood



Design by Banksy



Design by Barbara de Wilde



Design by Ben Gibson


Design by Bunpei Yorifuji


Design by Carin Goldberg


Design by Mark Robinson



Design by Michael Bierut and Yve Ludwig of Pentagram


Design by Peter Mendelsund (who I interviewed here)



Design by Robert Frank and Gerhard Steidl, of Frank's Portfolio



Design by Scott Magoon, for Steve Jenkins' picture book

4 comments:

Derek said...

It's interesting to speculate how readers' tastes might compare with those of professional designers. Here's the link for those who want to put in their two cents' worth: http://www.amazon.com/b/?node=2233760011

Matthew Adams said...

I love the Never smile at a monkey and Lark and termite covers especially. Still trying to make up my mind about the The best American nonrequired reading cover though.

Alan said...

FaceOut Books had a good interview about the Interrogative Mood design – the full spread's well worth checking out.

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service books work well individually, but they just kill as a series.

Thomas Hogglestock said...

I have a friend who recently had a book published. During the publishing process Amazon didn't care two figs about the cover design, but Barnes and Noble got her publisher to change the cover design completely. My take is that Amazon sells so many non-book items that they aren't as focused as B&N on what makes a book sell.