Peter Mendelsund talks about his creative process and what gives him inspiration for creating book jackets. By reading and annotating the text Peter tries to figure out the mood or the affect the book has on the reader, he tries to figure out a symbol that represents the text. Most of design is trial and error, and he designs the cover in an effort to capture how he was feeling when he was reading it and I think that’s what makes his designs so successful

I really enjoyed Chip Kidd’s TED talk, and his narration about how he designs book jackets. I find that his process starts by finding inspiration through imagery, text, and typography related to the theme of the book he is working on. I enjoyed all of his designs and his way of interpreting the theme of a book into imagery for the cover, all of his book jackets were very successful because they were new creative ideas.

After reading this article from PRINT magazine I got a sense of what it is like to be a book jacket designer. It’s a hard task to please your client, and not every book jacket will be designed perfectly the first time around. There are many factors that go into creating a successful book jacket, it hats be a new and exciting design, related to the text one way or another, and it has to be eye-catching in order to sell. However, to create a successful book jacket sometimes you have to rethink your designs. Reading this article made me realize that as a designer its okay to rethink your idea, redesign it, or just start over. In my personal experience redesigns have been more successful and I’m always happier with the end product than I was with the original. Pictured below are examples of book jackets that have been redesigned.