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Judging Books by their Covers


Jo_March

Book Covers  

78 members have voted

  1. 1. What do you think about real people being on book covers?

    • I don't like them.
      36
    • I like them.
      4
    • I don't care.
      38

This poll is closed to new votes


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What are the biggest turn offs or ons for you when it comes to book covers or other aesthetics of a book?  I really dislike actual people on book covers, and I love uneven page edges.  This is my first poll, so sorry if I mess up.

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RoseGoesToYale

Y'know, I tend to agree. The photos are usually awkward, especially on romance novels, barf. Nothing like a classic 1910s symmetrical art nouveau cover with a loose German-esque font.

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Really depends on books. E.g., a bibliography of Franz Ferdinand I read looked great with an image of Franz and Wilhelm II together hunting. But place some random face on the cover of a mystery novel and you have instantly lost some of my interest. Uneven page edges are a nice touch for some books, but would look out of place on a book about the Bauhaus or a spy thriller.

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I don't mind when it's an autobiography or clearly some personal philosophy kind of thing. So if the book is about Trump, sure include him on the cover, or all about Ben Shapiro's  obsession with "beating the left" then sure, whatever.

 

When it's a fiction novel... then I'm more hesistant because now I have a person in mind when reading the book. The Mortal Instruments series, when I read them, had bodies but the faces were cut off, and that was my limit. I want to read a book and form my own image of the characters. The Ranger's Apprentice series has people but as illustrations, and that's a bit more acceptable to me because it's the artist drawing the characters described rather than saying "Liam Neeson, that's my MC." 

 

It will also lead to unintentional racism. Books will likely have more white people on the front than non-white people, and this is of course justified by the tend of books to have white characters. It would still be an interesting study to see how people would react to book covers that are basically the same but some have white people on their covers and others don't. I think I can predict the outcome. 

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If you haven't seen them Chip Kidd's TED Talks are great.

 

If you have a clear intent with design you can get away with a lot. What really gets me is sloppy spine design. Usually it is too cluttered or makes it hard to figure out basic information. Now if we are taking comics I have a soft spot for DC's Mature Readers comic covers from the late 80's along with early Milestone covers.

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I like having real people on book covers. Especially if the book has been made into a movie or TV series it helps to connect the two. 

 

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If there's hearts/too much pink on the spine/cover it usually drives me away, because hearts/pink usually means "romance" or "excessively saccharine"

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OmegaTheMetamorphicDreamer

To be honest I much prefer artistic book covers. Especially since I love fantasy so much, and having "real" people on the cover would give off the wrong impression to me.

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I don't really want answer the 'no like' option, because depending on the book, it might be very fitting to have a person on the cover. Memoirs, for example. And some cases when the book is set in modern day, photographs work well. It is genre dependent. For fantasy, the genre I read the most, I do NOT want real people on the covers, it just feels wrong.

As for general dislikes, the opposite of Skyen three posts above. I hate when there is a movie poster cover on a book!

 

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I sometimes dislike it when there's practically anything on the cover. I like minimalism, and a book cover that's nothing but the book title (and maybe author name etc. ) grabs my attention much more than any number of fancy pictures (relevant xkcd ) . I also like a small illustration over a large one, and something abstract over something realistic. The old versions of the Wardstone Chronicles covers are superior to the new versions IMO.

 

And yeah, it depends on the subject matter. Different topics deserve different cover art styles, where `no art style' (e.g. title, author and nothing else) is a perfectly respectable choice. For only a few of them, photorealistic humans are a good choice (for even less of them, humans doing nothing but staring into space). A fantasy cover probably requires a scene (not a person, a scene) more rich and vibrant than could be plausibly photographed, and ... honestly, a good cover should represent a work, and a cover with scenery or a robot or a boy on an asteroid with a flower does more to represent the book than any photo ever could.

 

That said, I mostly read ebooks these days, and I've set my device not to display the covers, so it's mainly a moot point for me, but yeah. Not a fan of people on covers unless it's sufficiently abstract, barring specific topics.

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heh, I haven't read a physical book in years, just my Kindle.

 

On one hand, a lot of what I read has abstract art on the covers. On the ones that are relevant, I never liked covers. The images I make in my head of the characters are always so superior and I don't like having an outside influence on them

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It depends on the type of book and the type of photo used for the cover. If it's a biography of someone, it's nice to have a photo of the person on the cover. Usually, I don't really care about the covers, I just read the small summary at the back of the book and the reviews and if I find them intriguing, I end up buying it and reading it. One thing I don't like is when the photos or even images are too sexy, that is a real turn off for me and I will end up not reading it. 

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  • 1 year later...

@Jo_March

 

This poll is being locked and moved to the read only Census archive for it's respective year. As part of ongoing Census organisation, and in an attempt to keep the demographics of the polls current with the active user base at the time, the polls will last for one year from now on. However, members are allowed and even encouraged to restart new polls similar to the archived ones if they like them.

  

iff, Census Forum Moderator

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