Institutional Book Covers Designing a book cover is a long process requiring preparation, consultations with a lot of drafts and layouts for covering a lot of expectations. The best option is to hire a graphic designer, you will get a professional cover and be able to spend your time on the parts you can do better yourself. The graphic designer can also design an internal page layout that visually relates to the cover, harmonize the pages, and chapters.
Guidelines for a book cover design
Plan ahead: designing a cover is a long process, requiring preparation, consultations and numerous drafts and adjustments. Start planning and budgeting from the beginning of your project.
Hire a graphic designer: you will save time and have a cover that is professional and can stand up to comparison with others.
Consider buying photos from image banks: this way you can be sure of getting photos of high enough quality.
Prioritize your information: not everything appearing on your cover is equally important.
Don't put lots of detail on the cover: in an attempt to show all the ideas contained in the book.
Don't overload your cover: mosaics, photomontages and complex typography should be avoided.
Don't set the style of the cover: to suit your own personal tastes.
Don't decide alone: it takes creativity to design a cover, so you need to make sure that those involved understand and approve your choices.
The main purpose of the graphic design is to bring out and express in the form of specific designs, the information contained in a presentation document. This is the point of handover between the programme specialist and the graphic designer. Therefore, the design process can be summarized in two stages:
1. The preparatoty meeting
Sets out the scope of your project (objectives, readership, constraints, and resources) using graphic research to decide on the visual ambiance.
2. The graphic design gives form to the cover
The professional designer must draw up a number of graphic approaches to meet your expectations, based on the document produced earlier. The more relevant information that the document contains, the more targeted the creative response will be.
Some years ago, I had the opportunity to work as an internal Graphic Designer at UNESCO-IESALC (International Institute of the UNESCO for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean) for designing some book covers for the institution following the guidelines of UNESCO publishing, the Director vision, and the Communication Department observations until getting the last result.
Stages in the design of a front cover
Produce two or three quite different draft covers that comply with the criteria.
Discuss the proposals with the programme director: work together with the Communication Department Director in consultation with the authors and IESALC's Director, selecting one single mockup that I could then rework to arrive at the final cover design.
The programme specialist and the Communication Department Director made final corrections to the chosen draft cover.
Finalization and preparation of the final page proofs.
Prepare the selected book cover for printing.
