When a Picture Sells a Thousand Words

Legendary designer Peter Mendelsund on the art of the cover

From an early age, many of us are told not to judge a book by its cover, yet we intuitively know that first impressions matter—maybe more than they should. While the power of a book lies in its storytelling, its narrative, its words, very often the thing that determines whether those words are plucked from the shelf of a local bookstore is a book’s cover. 

Something will always be lost in translation when distilling a 70,000-word narrative into a single page, but when a cover lands “just right,” the result can have an outsized impact. So what story is the cover telling? 

WorldView spoke with noted book designer Peter Mendelsund, creative director at The Atlantic magazine and author of multiple novels and cover design books, to understand the process of making a good cover, knowing it will be judged. 

Mendelsund is also largely a stranger to the Peace Corps world, so we’ve asked him to bring his fresh eyes to a selection of books about Peace Corps and share his reactions. Whether you are designing your own cover as a self-published author or scanning a friend’s shelves at your next dinner party, you will surely start to see books with new eyes after hearing what Mendelsund has to say. 

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

WorldView: Book covers come in seemingly endless forms; as a designer, where does the artistic process start? 

Peter Mendelsund: First off, there are people who say it’s an art form, but it’s not. Cover design is a commercial enterprise. It’s about how a publisher wants to move a book in the marketplace, and the same book can have different covers that work depending on what they’re trying to achieve. 

But when you sit down to start a project, you have to read the book—always read the book—and try to determine what the project is. Sometimes even the author doesn’t know what the project is. What are the salient parts we are trying to get across? Is it a story with a particular moral or takeaway, dealing with a specific element of the human experience? Is it trying to take you on a journey? Is there a character/object/place that has a central metaphor you can represent on the cover? Identifying the message is the most important part for everything that comes next. 

Once you’ve done that due diligence, you decide on the medium: Will the message communicate best with a painting? A photo? An illustration? A pattern? How do we best convey anger, humor, or a complicated idea?  

WV: There’s a lot of “conventional wisdom” in the industry that certain genres have to follow some unwritten design rules. Does that matter to you? 

PM: In cover design, you have limited choices in terms of what to put your emphasis on: person, place, typography, mood. The key is to understand the prompt and make something that fits. 

One thing I try to drive home with publishers is that, while it’s true that most marketing works on the assumption that “like” things are easier for audiences to understand, more often than not, if you make something look like this other thing, you’re only camouflaging it. The book will get lost, so why not try something brand-new so that people will pick it up? 

It can be hard for some ideas to get traction with clients because people are very risk averse, but the most successful things for me, like Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or the Kafka series, have been the things that were sui generis. 

And maybe you keep the conventions in mind, but I want my job to be making things that are new and interesting. 

WV: I’m guessing that “new and interesting” means it takes time, so a lot of books just don’t get the treatment of a thoughtful cover. 

PM: Yes, but it’s so important. You have to be so careful to avoid the tropes that you see over and over. There was this grid that went around once of books about Africa, written on all kinds of topics by all kinds of people, that all used the same image of a [explicative] sunset with a silhouette of an acacia tree on the cover. 

It’s so important to think of ways to show place without the colonial lens; you don’t want to exoticize these people and places. It’s not easy. It’s about pulling a detail rather than using something that could be in a National Geographic article. 

WV: On that note, let’s look at some Peace Corps books. I shared a selection of about 50 books by RPCVs about the Peace Corps experience with you, and I’d love to get your general thoughts across what you’ve seen. 

PM: There is such a wide range of covers among the Peace Corps books, which supports how different memoirs are. But very few actually show the author; most are driven by place. There aren’t many of those tropes here—no acacia trees—which is nice.  

A lot of them have photos, and this is one way you can tell when a book is self-published, because they use personal photos that are low-resolution. Some are great photos, though. In situations like that, there could be a way to make it work, like taking the photo and showing it as a photo, sitting partially over the type like you’re looking at someone’s snapshot. That makes it an artifact, which makes it more interesting. 

The big differences among them are where it’s clear that a few of them are from major traditional publishers that take a more commercial approach, with the majority from smaller presses.  

WV: So we come back to “cover design is a commercial enterprise.” To ask the question writers are most interested in, what design choices most affect commercial success? 

PM: Well, the last part of the design process is understanding the marketing approach: deciding who the book is for and figuring out how you can reach them. You have to think about how you will grab a particular kind of reader. I could make anything look like a mass-market bestseller, but that’s not always the right fit for the book. 

The approach tends to show up mostly in the typography. The size of the typography clues you in to when they are trying to position something as a mass-market book: If you are wanting to signal that it’s important, make it in big type. It’s also about the variety of typefaces and styles you use. You can put a lot on there and make it look more like Men’s Health than The New Yorker. 

A cover can be successful because it helps sell, or it can be successful because it’s beautiful or clever. Sometimes they work in perfect sync, and sometimes they don’t.