Research point Many hundreds of paperback books have been produced over the years.
Look at as many variations as you can find to see how different publishing houses designed their covers and how the covers fit together as a series.
Select a particular publishing house and describe their design style in your learning log.
I wanted to understand better why are there imprints to big publishing houses, I didn't understand until I read this article that this is a good way for big publishing houses to divide their literature into sections and different editors. It is almost like franchise of big restaurants for my understanding - there is a massive house and it contains so many little imprints that are just way too hard to handle for the big editors and cheifs so they had to subdivide it.
The most famous publishing house which are known for their special book covers are Penguin, and I remember it since I was a child. I started reading about Penguin's book covers on this article, and figured out another publishing called Signet, I started searching about this publishing house and have found this article,
"The series’ distinctive visual style owed much to the influence of the artist James Avati. Dubbed “The Rembrandt of Paperback Book Covers”, often reminding one of Hopper’s bleak style, he drew many of the series’ covers and inspired the other illustrators commissioned by Signet."
Signet - Design style description
The consistency is very clear here, there is mostly a strip at the top describing in one sentence the book, and a signet logo on the side, there's another strip in the bottom of Signet books and a description of the genre or series. Then in the middle, there is an illustration, mostly seems like they are describing the main characters and the main situation of the book, usually, as it seems a female and a male (rarly only one of them). The typography is mostly on the top too.
I have to mention the illustrations seem very sexual too.
Signet Publishing House
I have found another source with a massive archive of Signet book covers and an interesting thing was to read signet was created by Ian Ballantine which departed Penguin and created his own publishing house called New American Library, Signet was the fiction label of this publication.
Pelican of Penguin
more of the legendary Pelican imprint of Penguin over the years
VINTAGE
another interesting publishing house is VINTAGE by Penguin.
I have found this article describing the book cover style of their imprints and this video inside.
I really like how they design their books, very cute and vintage and doesn't have too much space taken as normally with penguin for the house style.
New York Times
I was looking and searching the net a lot to find publishing houses and imprints which are using special book cover design and styles, and some of the publishing houses seemed to not have too many restrictions. I checked the best book covers of the New York Times for 2014 for instance, and for a publishing to have a specific style you would definitely manage to notice it especially if it's the same year on the best book covers. But surprisingly it was like they gave the designers a blank canvas to play around with, it seems like I have entered a contemporary art museum and the only thing that matches them all is the blank white space of the webpage between them. In a way, it was still looking like they were matching in their modernism.
Simon & Schuster
Another publishing house which I've come across from this article was Simon & Schuster
I went on looking for their book design to see if they have things in common in a particular style,
and came across this interesting article "Timothy Goodman’s “Rude Awakening” at Simon & Schuster"
which was an interesting source of information about the 'behind the scenes' of book design.
Here again, it doesn't feel like they are having a special style or design, more like a plain canvas for the designer to play and sell the book rather then be focused on matching it to the publishing house, they do have trilogies or book serious which has a similar design though.
