bookdesign_project | Entries tagged with bad design

Michael Haag. Cadogan Guide to Egypt. London: Cadogan Books, 1993. Illustrations by Sophie Morrish. Design by Animage. Cover illustration by Povl Webb, cover design by Ralph King. Collected 28 July

Floppy cover, very thin stock but laminated stock - this is a guidebook densely crammed with information and designed to be lugged round with minimum effort and maximum efficiency. Design-wise, where to start with this book? Like Soon I Will Be Invincible, the Cadogan Guide to Egypt is characterised by a holistic design sensibility. Unfortunately - especially since the book itself is great and, I am assured, useful - this design is not so good! I seized on it the moment Elaine brought it out for indexing practice.

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Vikas Swarup. Q and A. Doubleday, 2005. Cover design by Claire Ward. Illustration by Nicky Dupays. Collected 14 May 2010

Jacket

Matte laminated card with spot gloss on typography and on illustration.

This cover design is clearly going for minimalism, which in book design aims to get people to pick up a book just because it’s beautiful – not because they know what’s going on between the covers.Unfortunately in my opinion it is not a successful cover, perhaps because it fails to completely commit to the minimalism. The illustration on the cover, of a television, obstructs the book’s minimalism, but nor does it give much of an idea of what happens in the book, so the cover fails on both counts. Instead it becomes a cover that is neither beautifully simple nor informatively detailed. ( read more )

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Nancy Mitford. Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels (1945, 1949, 1951). Penguin, 2000 (Modern Classics), with an introduction by Philip Hensher. Cover photography (c) Host. No design info given. Collected 4 May

Unlaminated, very floppy card, desaturated colours, font-heavy front cover, no back cover art. This omnibus is chiefly of interest by comparison with Cold Comfort Farm, discussed below. Both books are Penguin Classics, satires by English women, historically but diminishingly widely read, being reissued with a critic’s introduction, with unlaminated covers and generally desaturated colours. Regrettably, the similarities end there. While the Penguin Deluxe edition of Cold Comfort Farm has pulled out all the stops and worked hard to emphasise the humour of Gibbons’ novel, the Mitford cover is dull as ditchwater and fails to capture any sense of Mitford’s notable wit. The back cover has been quite neglected - hence no scan - and looks more like a placeholder design with its dull silver-grey. The rose on the front cover is mysterious indeed. In essence, while the blurb describes the novels as ‘witty, irreverent stories of ... glamour, gossip and decadence’, the book’s cover gives it the lie, suggesting perhaps a torrid romance – doubtless disappointing many readers.

This book has not worn well. This book was acquired first-hand in late March 2010, and by the beginning of May it is already damaged and dirty. For a paperback containing three novels, clearly designed to be portable – for the pages are very thin and the type is rather small – this is simply thoughtless design. The covers should, at minimum, have been laminated, and the card should have been stiffer. Although a reader would not mind sacrificing quality for price in the case of the Pocket Penguin series – books designed to be read once – it is not appropriate for this volume. Paperbacks should be laminated.

15 July: Revisiting this cover, it's unfortunate that a backlit LCD screen makes it look quite vibrant! The physical book is quite dull.

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Entries tagged with bad design

Cadogan Guide to Egypt

Q and A

Love in a Cold Climate

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Wrapped in Newspaper

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