I have a copy of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue on vinyl that I bought at a record store in Chicago in 2011. I don’t listen to it very often anymore, but I keep it because the cover is one of the most beautiful pieces of graphic design I’ve ever seen. That blue, that particular shade, somewhere between midnight and cobalt, with Davis in profile, his trumpet raised. It tells you everything about the music inside before you hear a single note. Cool, spare, precise, and completely assured.

Now think about the last book cover that made you feel something comparable. Take your time. I’ll wait.

If you’re struggling, you’re not alone. Book cover design, despite some brilliant exceptions, has fallen into a kind of visual monotony that I find increasingly difficult to ignore. Walk into any bookstore and look at the fiction table. You’ll see a lot of the same visual vocabulary: desaturated color palettes, handwritten or hand-lettered titles, figures seen from behind or in silhouette, flat illustrations with limited detail. These covers aren’t ugly. Many of them are competent and even attractive. But they rarely surprise you, and they almost never stick in your memory the way a great album cover does.

I think the book industry could learn a lot from how the music world approaches visual identity, and I want to explain why.

The Album Cover as Cultural Object

Album covers have always occupied a different cultural space than book covers. Part of this is format. A 12-inch vinyl record sleeve is a big canvas, roughly 12.375 inches square, which gives designers real room to work. But format alone doesn’t explain the difference. Album covers have historically been treated as art objects in their own right, not just packaging for the product inside.

Think about the covers that have become iconic. Peter Saville’s design for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, those white radio waves on a black background, has been reproduced on t-shirts, posters, tattoos, and laptop stickers millions of times. Most of the people wearing that image have never listened to the album. The design has transcended its original purpose and become a freestanding piece of visual culture.

Or consider Storm Thorgerson’s work for Pink Floyd. The prism from The Dark Side of the Moon is recognizable to people who were born decades after the album’s release. The inflatable pig from Animals. The burning man handshake from Wish You Were Here. These images communicate ideas and feelings with an immediacy that most book covers don’t even attempt.

Why is this? I think there are several reasons, and understanding them might help us think about what book design could do differently.

Risk Tolerance

The music industry, for all its flaws, has historically been more willing to take visual risks than the publishing industry. When the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s in 1967 with its wildly colorful, cluttered, collage-style cover, it wasn’t playing it safe. When Kanye West put a censored painting by George Condo on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, it was deliberately provocative. When Billie Eilish posed in a bathtub full of black liquid for “bury a friend,” it was weird and unsettling and perfect for the music it represented.

Publishing tends to be more conservative. There are understandable commercial reasons for this. A book needs to communicate its genre quickly. Readers browsing online need to be able to identify at a glance whether a book is literary fiction, a thriller, a romance, or a self-help title. This has led to a heavy reliance on genre signifiers: dark moody covers for thrillers, whimsical illustrations for rom-coms, bold typography for nonfiction. These conventions are useful, but they’ve become so rigid that many covers feel interchangeable.

I recently saw a Twitter thread where someone collected the covers of 30 recent literary fiction titles. Laid out in a grid, they looked like one cover with 30 slight variations. Muted colors. Abstract shapes or minimal illustrations. Serif fonts. No single cover was bad, but collectively they represented a failure of imagination. They were all trying so hard not to offend that they’d forgotten to excite.

The Thumbnail Problem

One factor that deserves its own discussion is the impact of online retail on cover design. When most books were sold in physical stores, a cover needed to work at actual size, 6 by 9 inches for a typical trade paperback. Now, with a huge percentage of discovery happening on Amazon, Instagram, and Goodreads, covers need to work at thumbnail size. That’s roughly the size of a postage stamp on a phone screen.

This has pushed design toward simplicity, which isn’t inherently a problem. Some of the best album covers of all time are extremely simple. But in publishing, the response to the thumbnail problem has been to make everything bold, high-contrast, and uncluttered to the point of generic. Designers are essentially designing for the worst possible viewing conditions, and the covers that result are legible but lifeless.

Compare this to how musicians have handled the same challenge. Streaming services display album art at similarly small sizes, but you don’t see the same homogenization in music. Artists like Tyler, the Creator still commission bold, idiosyncratic artwork. Beyonce’s Renaissance cover was striking and specific. Even at thumbnail size, these images have personality. They don’t all look the same.

I think the difference comes back to risk tolerance. The music industry decided that distinctive visuals were worth the trade-off of potentially being harder to read at small sizes. Publishing, by and large, made the opposite choice. And I think publishing chose wrong.

Typography as Identity

One area where album covers consistently outperform book covers is typography. Music designers have always treated type as a visual element, not just a way to display the artist’s name and the album title. The hand-drawn lettering on Led Zeppelin’s albums, the custom typefaces of Kraftwerk, the grunge-era chaos of Nirvana’s design: each typographic choice reinforced the music’s identity.

Book covers use typography too, obviously, but they tend to treat it more conservatively. There’s an over-reliance on a few “safe” typefaces and a reluctance to let type do the heavy lifting. The most memorable book covers of recent years, things like Chip Kidd’s work or the Penguin Drop Caps series, have been the ones that treat typography as art. But these are exceptions. The default in book publishing is still to use type that’s readable and appropriate but not particularly distinctive.

I’d argue that for many books, the title itself should be the primary design element. If you have a great title (and you should, because a bad title means you have bigger problems than your cover), why not make the typography extraordinary? Why not commission a custom hand-lettered title that becomes inseparable from the book’s identity? This is standard practice in music. It should be standard in publishing.

The Importance of Cohesive Visual Identity

One thing the music industry does exceptionally well is visual coherence across an artist’s career. When Radiohead releases an album, you can usually tell it’s a Radiohead album by the visual style before you see the band’s name. Stanley Donwood’s artwork has become so intertwined with the band’s identity that you can’t think of one without the other. The same goes for Gorillaz and Jamie Hewlett’s character designs, or the distinctive visual language that accompanies each Kendrick Lamar release.

Authors rarely have this kind of visual continuity. If you put the covers of a single author’s books side by side, they often look like they were designed by different people for different publishers, which in many cases is exactly what happened. Each book gets a cover that’s designed to sell that specific book, with little thought to how it relates to the author’s broader visual identity.

There are exceptions. Haruki Murakami’s Vintage International editions have a consistent visual language, as do many of Donna Tartt’s editions. But these are the result of specific design decisions, not the industry norm. For most authors, especially mid-list and debut authors, each cover is designed in isolation.

At ScrollWorks Media, this is something I think about constantly. When we design covers for our titles, I want a reader to be able to look at two of our books side by side and sense a relationship between them. Not identical, not templated, but belonging to the same family. I think this kind of visual consistency builds publisher recognition in a way that random, disconnected covers cannot.

Color as Emotion

Album cover designers have always understood that color is emotional, not decorative. The oppressive green of Type O Negative’s World Coming Down. The blinding white of the Beatles’ self-titled album. The warm analog orange of Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange. In each case, the color palette is doing real emotional work, setting a mood before any music plays.

Book covers use color too, but often in more predictable ways. Thrillers tend toward dark blues and blacks. Romances lean into pinks and pastels. Literary fiction often defaults to muted, sophisticated palettes that signal “serious” without communicating much else. These genre conventions serve a sorting function, but they don’t take many chances.

I’d love to see more book covers that use color with the same emotional precision as great album art. A novel about grief doesn’t have to be gray and muted. A comedy doesn’t have to be bright and cheerful. The most interesting design happens when the visual choices complicate the reader’s expectations rather than confirming them. A horror novel with a beautiful, serene cover. A love story in stark black and white. These contrasts create intrigue, and intrigue gets people to pick up the book.

Photography vs. Illustration

Album covers have moved fluidly between photography and illustration throughout their history. There’s no bias toward one or the other; it’s purely a question of what serves the specific project. Book covers, in the current market, trend heavily toward illustration for fiction and photography for nonfiction, with exceptions in both directions. This isn’t a rule anyone wrote down, but it’s a pattern that’s become so dominant it might as well be one.

I think breaking this pattern more often would produce more interesting covers. Some of the most striking book designs I’ve seen recently have been photographic covers for fiction, using images that are ambiguous and suggestive rather than literal. And some of the best nonfiction covers have been illustrated, using visual metaphor instead of documentary photography. The willingness to cross these artificial boundaries is something album cover design has always had, and book design needs more of.

The Designer’s Role

In music, album cover designers are sometimes famous. Vaughan Oliver, whose work for 4AD Records defined an entire aesthetic. Stefan Sagmeister, whose provocative designs became cultural talking points. Hipgnosis, the design collective behind some of the most iconic rock covers of the 1970s. These designers had creative freedom and were often given as much artistic latitude as the musicians themselves.

Book cover designers are rarely given that kind of latitude. The design process in publishing typically involves multiple rounds of revision, input from editors, marketing teams, sales departments, and sometimes the author themselves. The result is often a design that’s been committee’d into inoffensive competence. Nobody hates it, but nobody loves it either. It’s a cover that passed through enough filters to have all its edges smoothed away.

There are book designers doing extraordinary work. Peter Mendelsund, whose covers for Stieg Larsson and Kafka are brilliant. Chip Kidd, who has been reinventing book design for decades. John Gall’s consistently inventive work for Vintage Books. But these designers tend to work on high-profile projects where they have more creative freedom. The vast middle of the industry, the thousands of covers designed each year for mid-list titles, rarely receives the same attention or resources.

I think small publishers actually have an advantage here. Without the layers of corporate approval that slow down the big houses, we can take design risks more easily. When we designed the cover for Echoes of Iron, we had exactly three people in the conversation: the designer, the editor, and me. That’s it. No sales committee. No market research. Just a clear creative vision and the freedom to execute it. I think the result is a cover that feels personal rather than focus-grouped.

Where Things Are Heading

I see some hopeful signs. The success of independent publishers with strong visual identities, houses like Graywolf, Tin House, and Two Dollar Radio, is proving that distinctive design can be a commercial advantage. These publishers are developing recognizable visual brands, and their covers stand out precisely because they don’t look like everything else on the shelf.

Social media has also created new incentives for distinctive cover design. A striking, unusual cover gets shared on Instagram and BookTok in ways that a safe, conventional one doesn’t. If your cover becomes a meme or a trending post, that’s marketing money can’t buy. This is shifting the calculus slightly, making risk look less risky and convention look more costly.

I also think AI-generated imagery, for all its problems, is going to force a reckoning. As generic, AI-produced cover images become cheaper and more common, the value of truly original, human-designed covers will increase. The book that clearly had a real artist behind its cover will have a distinction that AI-illustrated books won’t. This is similar to what happened with music production: as digital tools made generic beats easy to produce, the value of distinctive, human musicianship went up.

What I’d like to see, and what I’m trying to do with the books we publish here, is a publishing culture that treats the cover as an essential part of the reading experience rather than a sales tool to be optimized. The best album covers aren’t marketing. They’re art that happens to also sell records. Book covers can be both, too, if we let them.

You can see some of our approach to design across our full catalog. Every cover gets the same creative attention as the words inside it.