...and now, two more book covers

I'll spend a bit less time trying to make just one point with my other two book covers:

It's everyone's favourite airport thriller series. I'm not sure what to say about this cover. I think it's a bit misleading, considering what the book is about. I've found that all of these "Millennium Trilogy" books have very Oriental looking covers. I realise that the title character has a Chinese dragon tattoo (it's in the title after all), but still - it's not a particularly big stretch of the imagination using that as the cover image. This particular cover feels even more Asian than it should be due to all the flowing line shapes and muted colours. I'm not sure why the artist would go so far in this direction for a book about Swedish Nazi rapists (spoiler alert), but I find it a bit off topic.

Still, if we put that aside - having the title text all over the page causes you to slow down as you read it. Because of this there's a slightly more mysterious vibe to what you're reading. Having the dragon's tendril-things flowing through the text makes it feel more a part of the cover, and less like it was simply placed on top. The font is solid, which is good contrast to the curves of the image underneath.

However, I can't get over the fact that a book that has nothing to do with Asia looks so incredibly Asian. I'm sure someone would argue that the dragon represents the book's deeper concepts of predatory human nature or some crap, but I really think it gives the wrong impression.



Everyone knows Animal Farm as "that book I did at school" so it comes under that same iconic category that I talked about in the last post (which I hope made sense). It has a lot of red imagery (red, communism - get it?) so it appears very bold on the self. The design mimics a Russian propaganda poster, and hence all the typography and layout parodies the era.

Designing the cover this way seems the obvious choice, but even so, I enjoy the style. There are a lot of variations of these Animal Farm propaganda covers (there are even some good ones on Deviant Art), but I like this particular one as it's quite subtle (for propaganda). It also doesn't turn the animals into caricatures, which occasionally happens - making the book look too much like a comedy-satire.

I saw that 1984 got a similar design by the same artist. Both are very well done, for what was intented.