When we tell people we are Visual Information Designers, we are often met with raised eyebrows and questions like: “Is that like art or something?”. The truth is, “Graphic Design” just isn’t a good enough term anymore to properly label anything that has to visually convey a message. Like a book cover, for example; it is not art, it is information design; and if you’ve ever read Edward Tufte, you know that good design should be as nearly invisible as possible.
What? Invisible design? But that is logically impossible. No! Invisible design means that you will spend the least amount of time looking at the presentation and maximize the time focused on the content -or information- because the design was perfectly planned so that you didn’t have to spend any time figuring it out. Now, if we apply this principle to designing book covers, it means that the best of them will immediately tell you what you are about to read and you won’t even have time to think about it.
Ok, it may not be as simple as it sounds; so we’ll give you an example. Last week, when we wrote about great books with bad covers, we almost mentioned “Black Iris” by Leah Reader. We’ve heard this is a fantastic read and it has received a lot of praise and amazing reviews; we wish the cover would reflect that. The thing is, all we can see and focus on is what the designer did on Photoshop.
To be completely blunt, we immediately started picturing the PSD Layers and mentally clicking “layer style”, then “outer glow” options on the menu. In fact, when we discussed this cover, we realized we could probably recreate it (or come very close)…and we did.
Why is this so bad? Technically, we could recreate any book cover if we spent enough time analyzing it. The thing about this one, though, is that the design process is so obvious and in-your-face that we couldn’t focus on what it was trying to tell us, and therefore, it failed at doing its job as information design.
To further illustrate our point, we compared the cover of “Black Iris” with that of “The Martian” and “Cinder”. You may think these are completely different and have absolutely nothing in common, but actually, they all have the same basic composition: background, representative element, typography. They all have a non-white background, followed by it’s main element (or the thing that represents something about the book) in the middle and then the title and author in the foreground.
The big difference here is that book covers like “The Martian” and “Cinder”, while using the same basic composition and elements, show that invisible design is definitely possible to accomplish. Designs like these are not only beautiful, but functional and purposeful and those are the best kind…the only kind, actually. Just remember: “Good design is clear thinking made visible.” - Edward Tufte
Read you next time,
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