Post-Rooney, cover designers are opting for photographs instead to invoke “a similar feeling and message of that loneliness or frustration”. “Illustrated covers had their moment,” says Campbell. “As a designer, you are looking for something that will reach the same mass audience … but in a different way, setting the story apart.” Choosing a faceless woman over a portrait “adds an anonymity that lets the reader imagine the story as their own”.īut “at the back of every trend, there is something emerging that is the opposite, or pushes it further,” she says. “Bold colour pallets, type-led, graphic and visual” are all design choices made to “romanticise the ideas and experiences in the book”, says Yans. They tend to appeal to “anyone who is a fan of the greats, like your Didions” as well as “a younger audience with geometric shapes and colours”. James Ross, operations manager at Gleebooks, says he has been seeing “variations on Sally Rooney covers” coming through his bookshop – like Diana Reed’s Love and Virtue, Holly Wainwright’s I Give My Marriage a Year, and the international cover of Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss. With Normal People becoming a huge hit and landing plenty of awards, “publishers wanted to follow its success – designers go, ‘this book is similar, so let’s make it look similar too’,” he says. Campbell calls it a “sad, lonely illustration style. The novel featured a large bold title and minimalistic line art of lovers embracing in a tin, against a muted olive backdrop. “Especially when separate designers from separate publishing houses are coming to the same place by themselves.” ‘Illustrated covers had their moment’Ĭampbell says “a saturation of illustrated covers” followed the publication of Sally Rooney’s Normal People back in 2018. “You know it is a trend,” Mark Campbell, head of HarperCollins’ design department, says. “I feel it makes it easier for me to design them.” Maybe it is a result of the pandemic, but I fully relate to these books,” she laughs. “And all of these books coming through are about distressed women in their 20s, reflecting on the chaos of life at that point.
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