in Design
The cover for Dreamscape Code
Type large enough to read as a thumbnail, one red word, and a stain that works as ink and as blood.
Most covers are first seen at about the size of a postage stamp, in a list, beside forty others. Whatever else it does, a cover has to survive that. So the title of Dreamscape Code is set in a heavy condensed face, stacked in three lines, filling the space edge to edge: legible at thumbnail size, and still interesting at the size of a hand.
One word carries the colour
CODE is red, which pulls the eye down the stack and sets up the single red mark at the top right, spattering away from the letterforms. On a book about dreams it reads as ink. On a book where people get hurt it reads as something else. Both readings are correct, and the cover does not choose between them.
What was left out
No figure, no sky, no keyhole, no silhouette walking away from the viewer. The commonest mistake in a first cover is adding one more idea to make sure the reader gets it, and the result is a picture that argues with its own type.
Everything else is restraint: warm paper white, a thin keyline, the author's name at the foot in the same face as the title, and a small red eye in the bottom corner, the same mark that sits on the title page inside.
The parts nobody sees
A print cover is not one image. It is a wrap: back, spine and front on a single sheet, with the spine width calculated from the page count and the paper stock, and an eighth of an inch of bleed on every outer edge that will be trimmed away. Get the spine wrong by a millimetre and the title creeps around the corner of the finished book.
The ebook and the audiobook need none of that, but each needs its own file at its own proportions: a tall rectangle for the ebook, a square for the audiobook. All of them come out of the same design. None of them is a crop of another.