James Victore Shares Book Cover Design Secrets

Full video transcript

The hardest cover I ever designed was my own, was spec perfection, because I got pretty good as a designer, and so I don’t do a lot of book covers now. I have one client that I work with continually, and I’ve worked with them for the last five years, maybe more, and they’re a publisher out of England called the Do Books, and I design all of their covers.

The way that relationship worked was it went like this. I had a reputation as a designer. I was speaking in Wales at this high-end conference called the Do Lectures, and they put together, after I got back about six months later, they got in touch with me and said, listen, we’re gonna start a publishing arm of people, speakers who have come to the Do Lectures, who don’t have a book, but we think they have a book in them, so we’re gonna publish our own authors. I’m like, awesome. They said, we want you to do the covers. I said, super. And they said, here’s our budget. And it was like a pittance, because compared to what I get paid for one cover, this was like not even a quarter of that.

So I said, okay, here’s how it goes. I will design your series look, and I will design all of your covers, and I will do it for that money, but here’s the thing: you get no say whatsoever. I design it, it gets printed. And they said, that makes us nervous. And as soon as the first four came out, they wrote on their blog, “James Victore asked us to trust him, and we’re glad we did.” So it’s been a long-standing relationship working with this one client.

What I do for them is terribly simple, maybe. There’s nuance to it, there’s little tricks that I have to do to make it work, but it’s pretty straightforward. So what I did for them was I came up with a series look, which is basically one typeface, one size. The size that the type on the cover ends up being depends on the length of the title. If it’s a huge title with big words and everything, then the typography gets smaller. If it’s short words, then the typography gets bigger. So basically it can grow and expand. If the author’s name is two or three authors, the author’s name has to get small, but otherwise that’s it.

So the series look goes like this: it’s just starting up in the corner, you know, flush left, upper right corner, everything hangs from there. If it’s a longer title, it’ll go all the way down. If it’s a shorter title, there’s space in the bottom. And what I do with the image is basically smack dab in the middle of the book. Now that’s the only hard part in some of them, you’ve got to, there’s some nuances to make it read. But to me this was a dangerous motif, right, but I knew that at the end it would make, when you put all the books up together, and there’s like maybe 40 of these now, when you put them all together they make a beautiful collection.

And what happens is like they just had a photograph, just yesterday on their Instagram, of a selection of them at the Tate museum in London, right? So the bookstores at the museums are putting them out like showing them properly, which is funny.

But as far as typography, find something that you like. So I’m gonna go really basic and teach people basically how to design. Just find something that you like. So the Do Books, it was just Caslon, a really straightforward font, it looks kind of lovely. That’s the regular face and that’s the italic, that’s it. When I’m designing a book cover or designing anything, I pick one and just basically the regular sizes of it, no bold, no italic, no semi-bold, unless it really needs it, unless there’s some hierarchy that has to happen, you know, read this first, read this second, read this third.