in Design
The Director's eye
A small red mark on the cover of Dreamscape Code, and the first thing you see when you open it.
There is a small red eye in the bottom corner of the cover of Dreamscape Code. Open the book and the same eye is on the title page, drawn larger, locked up with the title. It is the book's own mark, and it sits where a publisher's logo usually would.
One mark, several jobs
A cover has to carry a mark of some kind in the corner where a publisher's logo usually sits. The easy answer is to put the publisher there. The more useful one is to give the book something of its own, a sign that means nothing on the first reading and something on the second.
The eye does that. On the cover it is a detail. On the title page it is the first image in the book, and the reader carries it into the story.
Drawn once, used everywhere
The eye is drawn as a vector, so the same artwork works at every size without softening: the corner of a paperback, the title page of the hardback, the opening screen of the ebook. There is a red version and a black one. In the ebook it is drawn in the text colour, so it follows the reader's light, sepia or night setting rather than sitting on the page as a fixed picture.
Small decisions like this are what separate a designed book from a formatted one. Most readers will never think about the mark in the corner. The ones who do will find it was there on purpose.