NOTE: I found this in my drafts from Aug 2012 and never finished it. But it’s just as relevant almost a year later.
Back in 2008 I wrote a blog post saying that Album Cover Designers were the The New Iconographers. Today, book cover designers are in the same boat thanks to eBooks. I heard an interview with Chip Kidd on WBUR that did a nice job of highlighting this issue. Here’s an insightful quote:
“…one of the lessons I learned in school is, you know, the whole point of a thumbnail drawing, a tiny little sketch, is that if something looks good small, if it’s effective small, it’s going to look great when it’s bigger. And the one thing I had to deal with – and this was way before e-books frankly – was the argument I don’t think this is going to look good when it’s tiny and on Amazon. People don’t buy a book on the web because of the cover. They’ll buy a book on the Web because they read a review or it’s word-of-mouth or, you know, some combination of the two, or they saw it on “Good Morning America” or what have you.”
Listen to the entire interview on Boston’s NPR station, WBUR…
