Thysbelon.Logo of a Hummingbird moth.

Talking About My Inspirations

An illustration of me looking at three book covers.

Hello! Today I'm going to talk a bit more about why I chose the designers that I did in my previous post.

I mentioned that my favorite cover in the collection was Everything Matters!. The first thing I like about this cover is that it uses only four colors. Whenever I draw, I always try to limit the number of colors I use, and I really like character designs that use only three colors. Designs like these are simple and memorable.

When designing with only a few colors, it's important to make sure the colors stand out from eachother. This makes the design easy to read. Using colors with very different brightness also helps a design pop, in general.

an image of simple colors with the right half in grayscale, showing that purple is a dark color in grayscale, yellow is bright, and blue is in the middle.
a common tip is to use an all black layer set to "color" to make sure your colors stand out

This brings me to my second point about the book cover, I like how it uses highly contrasting colors.

The cover of the book Everything Matters. A ring of comets with alternating hot pink and teal streaks rush towards the title.

The cover uses both black and white, the two colors that contrast the most. although the hot pink and teal don't contrast as much in terms of just brightness, they still stand out because they're highly saturated colors with very different hues. This is also the third reason I like this cover, it uses pink and blue, which are my two favorite colors.

The fourth thing that I like about this cover is it's use of shapes. Just like how a distinct silhouette and set of shapes make a character recognizable, the shapes used in the Everything Matters! cover let you know what kind of book it is. the sharp lines that fan out from the title, and the scratchy, bold typeface, give a feeling of desperation, like the world is ending and yet there are people who don't care. And those same sharp lines, along with the hot pink and teal, show that the book is also a comedy.

Book cover. An illustration of a person's face is covered at the bottom half by a red jacket cover

As for book covers by the other designers that match these points, The Learners cover had John Fullbrook III as art director. It uses only three colors, black, white and red. The contrast between the panicked-looking illustration and the simple jacket cover with cursive type makes the cover distinct

two sides of a book cover, the title and author are on the back side.

My favorite design by Rodrigo Corral was the Lullaby cover. the illustration uses only black and yellow, with the bird resting on a plain white background. The simple image says a lot about the book. The lone dead bird is quite somber, and the emptiness around it draws attention.

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