Typography is a form of art. Not only can typography be used to create inspirational and motivational posters and prints, it can also be used to create attention-grabbing book covers. When done right, a book cover with stunning typography design can encourage readers to reach for that particular book. In other words, a book cover matters when it comes to book sales.
The cover of your book should have three key elements. Those elements are clarity, intrigue, and accuracy. Carefully chosen fonts paired with creativity can convey all of the above, eliminating the need to come up with accompanying graphic design for the book cover. With so many beautiful fonts online, ranging from classic to bold, edgy, brush, retro, tattoo, and script fonts, you are only limited by your imagination. You can use these fonts to create stunning designs that match the story, the genre, and the mood of the book.
For example, using an old style slab serif font can help you produce a bold, handcrafted look and feel for your book cover. A soft, rounded sans-serif is a great choice for a book geared towards a female audience while a whimsical, decorative or handwritten font will appeal to young children.
In this post, we’ve rounded up some of the best, beautifully colorful typographic book cover designs from all over the world. As you’ll see from the examples below, typography is not only vital to the book cover design but it can also be used in creative ways to produce mini works of art. Use them as an inspiration for your next book cover design project.
Flies and Carrots By Ryan McGuire
Always & Forever and Five Other Lies by Veronika Simonovic
The Future of an Illusion – Sigmund Frued
The Collected Poems of Frank O”Hara
Eating Animals – Jonathan Safran Foer
Love of Beauty is the Taste the Creation of Beauty is Art – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Typography GRA 1206
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran Foer
Graphic Design the Forgotten Web Standard
I”m with the Brand – Rob Walker
The Spy Who Loved Me – Ian Fleming
Against Happiness – Eric G Wilson
Thinking With Type – Ellen Lupton
Idea Index, Graphic Effects and Typographic Treatments – Jim Krause
What Do You Care What People Think? – Richard Feynman
The Unabridged Pocket Book of Lightening – Jonathan Safran Foer
A Long Time Ago Essentially True – Brigid Pasulka
The Only Alien on the Planet – Kristen D. Randle
Up A Tree at Night with a Hedgehog – P.Robert Smith
Maigret – George Simenon
Number 9 Dream – David Mitchell
No Country For Old Men, Somehwere Out There Is a True and Living Prophet of Destruction – Cormac McCarthy
The Dream Of Perpetual Motion, A novel – Dexter Palmer
Me, The Me I Want to Be – John Ortberg
The Coffee Book, Recipes, Thoughts, Ideas
A Controversy of Poets – Paris Leary and Robert Kelly
The Gone Away World – Nick Harkaway
GUT Symmetrie – Jeanette Winterson
Happy Fish, A Collection of Art – Southwestern Oklahoma State University
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
As we can see, typography is an amazing graphical tool that can be used in remarkable ways. These book cover designs use color as a tool to enhance the message of the book. The cover is in some ways more important than the blurb as it is the first thing a reader will see.
In other words, graphic design is what the audience sees first. They say that a picture is worth 1000 words. Imagine how many more words well-executed typography can say?