So many examples to choose from, this is nice though its not really an illustration
Lets start with this cover.
What does it look like without the lettering?
The illustration is still striking but the words bring it together, it wouldn't work as well if the lettering all ran horizontally or the title lettering was uniform. The wonkiness of the title lettering reflects the wonkiness of the relationship between the protagonists in the text.
If you can get beyond the irritating popups this shows the evolution of the cover of The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien.
I think that this was designed by Tolkein who provided the original drawings for his book. He claimed that he couldn't draw but he clearly had an eye for design. Seen as a whole the dust jacket draws you towards the mountain but viewed wrapped around the book you have a classic rule of thirds design. The design is obviously influenced by 1930's fashions in lettering and art. The lettering sits comfortably over the background and is easy to read. Your eye is drawn to the title even though it sits on a busy background. Subsequent designs attempted to depict the hobbits and other fantasy creatures. As with illustrations for The Metamorphosis they limit the viewers imagination and rarely do the story justice even Tolkein's original drawings are best when he concentrates on the landscape rather than the characters. Additional writing on the cover is unobtrusive whilst adding extra information.
In my feedback for Assignment 2 my tutor suggested that I look at Ralph Steadman. He did some illustrations of A Christmas Carol which leave space for the lettering, here they are for the title sequence of a film which has similar requirements to a book jacket. This version was commissioned for the Illustrated London News but never used. He allows the detail of the illustration to fade to a plain background for text.
Looking around the house at illustrated books there are 3 main approaches.
The easiest way is to divide the front page and put the illustration one side and the text on the other. It doesn't make for a particularly striking design but it's practical. The text is clear and readable the illustration doesn't have to battle with it to get its message across. These a just three examples, lots of the books in my house use this style.
These books leave a defined space for the text. It's more dynamic but still easy to read. It can make the cover quite flat but that doesn't usually matter.
I'm not sure if the colour has faded on this book but if not the colour choices are odd, the figure is a monochrome orange and looks very out of place against the daisies of the background. The lettering is kept safely within boxes and the author is given as much importance as the title but the boxes are tucked behind the figure so that she is pushed forward.
I don't think that the covers would have been the reason I bought any of these books.
I particularly don't like this cover. What were they thinking hyphenating maintenance? The lettering doesn't belong with the illustration and the illustration is simplistic and doesn't really represent the story. This is a better version, but this illustrator has gone a bit too deeply into the story with a large and confusing number of metaphors. The text is placed above the illustration but the font doesn't seem to belong with it and the designer couldn't decide whether to use capitals or lower case letters.
(Incidentally, here is a short text based animation, it's a long time since I read the book so I can't remember if the quotes are from it, I would expect that they are. I like the simple graphic style which is more respectful of the book.)
This cover for GQ magazine is absolutely fantastic. Limited colour palette, bold simple lines, striking.
Most cover designers seem to be anonymous. Then I found Noma Bar whose designs are striking and witty. Generally the illustrations work well with the magazine titles though I thought that Wallpaper was awful. They seem to be welded to the design of their header, a white strip across the top of the front page with plain black lettering and an unexplained asterisk. I don't think that it's a great design at the best of times and it looks completely out of place with Bar's graphic images, cut and pasted together with no thought of the effect created. A poor advert for a design magazine.
Contrast this with the New Yorker which maintains the corporate identity of it's covers with subtle modifications to fit in with the illustrations. Christoph Nieman has done a variety of topical illustrations including designs with augmented reality.
Coverjunkie is a useful resource.
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