Use Color to Bring your Book Cover to the Next Level

EVOCATION

Color is evocative. It taps right into our emotions. When people see certain colors they start to have an emotional response without any consent from the conscious mind. This is why color is so important in visual art and design. It communicates with the deepest parts of you and transcends language, education, and socioeconomic status. Warm colors can bring up feelings of comfort, affection, or even anger. Cool colors are soothing and calm. Like the desire to be warm and fed, our responses to color seem to be hardwired.

CHROMATIC GRIMOIRE

But it isn’t just that simple. When designing a book cover you have to be aware of how color is used in the modern age. You see, the entertainment industry is constantly leveraging the power of color and has established many tropes based on colors. They have created a sort of color grammar, one that is intelligible to those who know what to look for. This chromatic grammar is as prevalent as the entertainment industry itself. For example, the color blue is now associated with science, mathematics, computing and artificial intelligence. It is no mystery why IBM used blue in their logo and on the cases of their mainframe computers, earning them the nickname “Big Blue”.

Since we all consume entertainment daily we have all been conditioned by the chromatic grammar included in our entertainment.

MASTER OF BOTH

When designing a book cover you must consider both how the colors of the cover will affect the viewer on an emotional level, and how the colors will be interpreted by the viewer based on their chromatic conditioning. Beyond that, you must also leave room for novelty. You should be ready to make informed diversions from the usual color uses.

THE GENRES

To gain a decent understanding of how to use color in your book covers it is best to learn which colors are typically associated with the different genres. Genre specific colors are informed by both the color grammar, and our primal responses to color, so a study of genre colors is a good study of…

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