Chipp Kidd on Book Cover designing - TED talk

The awesome and famous Chipp Kidd gave a TED talk on how he designs book covers - his efforts to convey the story in the cover, or intrigue the reader into buying the book.
If you haven't heard of him, here are some of his most famous cover designs:

Quote from the video:

“A book cover is a distillation. It is a haiku of the story.”

Also, listening to TED talks are pretty interesting way to pass the time! If you click through, don't blame me for the time you spend on the TED website/app on your device!
For more Chipp Kidd designs, the Book Cover Archive is the place to go.

Cover Art: Whelan painting the final Wheel of Time & Pratchett's latest

Tor recently announced the cover artist for AMOL ( A Memory of Light), the final book in the long-running wheel of time series - Michael Whelan. Last year, I posted here about how he was picked to design the cover for the AMOL ebook, and now, due to the previous cover artist's death, he will be designing the jacket for the print books too.
He does pretty good work (see The Way of Kings cover here). I just hope these are better than the really ugly covers we've seen from Tor before - see earlier Wheel of Time covers here. In contrast, the ebook covers are impressive! My favorites are the ones by Sam Weber (pictured to the right here) and Raymond Swanland.



In other exciting Pratchett news, the cover for Dodger is here. Dodger is an upcoming Victorian-era novel, not set in the Discworld. This is probably going to be a good place to start for non-Pratchett readers too. What a fantastic year this is going to be for Pratchett fans!! Dodger in September, a new June release collaborative novel, and a new Discworld novel later this year to conclude the Moist van Lipwig trilogy.

The wonderful people at Penguin have come up with some interesting innovations around Book Jackets. Finally, a breath of fresh air in this industry! A publisher that seems to be open to ideas, and experiments.
What am I talking about?

This is a CRAZY COOL concept - have an artist design covers around some great books, and relaunch said books (with some extras like new forewords). Penguin Threads is an intriguing concept, and they've certainly picked some crowd-pleaser classics for the launch. Black Beauty, Emma and The Secret Garden, all childhood/teen favorites of mine, and of many others.
Penguin has commissioned Jillian Tamaki to design these covers, and hand-stitch them. We get that you and I can't buy a hand-stitched book jacket, but the mass-produced one still looks to be a gem!
I've never seen these in India yet, book jackets tend to be just for show on shelves. Maybe there should be a campaign around showing off your book jacket via Facebook/social media?

Minimalistic Book Covers - Photoblog

Authored by Dave Cullen, Michael Skerker, Eric Wilson and R. L. Stevenson.

And authored by Judy Budnite, Charles W, Particia Morrisroe respectively.

Wouldn't you just jump up and buy those books? I would! 

The last Hop on Friday asked about covers, and since then my eyes have been increasingly noticing cover art.

If you want to see more (about 40+) of these minimalistic designs, head to The Inspiration Blog. If you have any that you want to call out, add the links below!