Book cover design an art form in itself
August 9 - 15, 2010
On August 28, workers at Perfect Binding in Yangon collate printed pages into books ready for binding. Pic: Christopher Davy
AMONG the many bookstalls on Yangon’s Pansodan Road, Ma Thidar Cho looks carefully. Laid out on plastic groundsheets, all manner of books wait to catch the eye of people passing by. An English book with a white cover and photo of black glasses grabs Ma Thidar Cho’s attention and she buys it without hesitation.
“I can’t read English books well but I keep them among the various books on my bookshelf because I love the book covers,” she says about her collecting habit.
“Sometimes I buy books because of the designs or neat binding. I keep the books even though I don’t read them. Whenever I go to a bookshop and see such a variety of books I don’t know what to read first. I usually pick up those that are eye-catching,” she adds.
Graphic designer and artist Zaw Mong has been creating book cover designs for 14 years. Although his preference is for clean, simple design, he believes the most important thing is for the cover to accurately reflect the content of the book.
“In bookshops the shelves are crowded with books so it’s quite difficult to attract people’s attention… Your book should be attractive and distinct and you shouldn’t make the cover jumbled just to show how skillful a designer you are,” says the artist, who designs five to six covers a month, often using illustrations and graphics.
“Even though I may have already bought a book, I usually buy other editions of it if I like the cover designs; the same book but with a different cover gives a different impression. It’s like seeing the same body with different faces. Also, the covers say something about the taste of the designers from the period,” he says.
The owner of Seik Ku Cho Cho Publishing also sees the value, both aesthetic and financial, in publishing books with attractive cover designs.
“We can’t say that book sales sharply increase because of a [better] cover but it’s a marketing technique,” says U San Oo, who has worked in the publishing industry for 11 years. “When products have the same quality, people normally buy the product with better packaging.”
While different publishers put varying levels of effort into the covers of the books they publish, generally, if a book is thought to be a potential best-seller more effort will go into its cover.
“If the book is quite sure to be a best-seller the publisher will take more care on the cover than usual to show their generosity toward the readers. Some books are published in many editions by different publishers so they try to distinguish between each other’s editions,” says San Oo.
He offers Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which is translated in Burmese as Min Thar Lay, as an example. “I saw this book with more than 14 different covers on the bookshelves of some bookshops in Japan. I can see the effort required to make each one different through the variety of cover designs. It’s really wonderful.”
In recent years publishers have had more freedom to create better covers owing to a greater selection of imported paper types and more experimentation with the addition of special colours such as bright orange, gold, silver or deep purple to the standard four-colour printing process.
“I have noticed that a number of specially designed books were published in the past. They mostly used illustrations by artists. Although the materials they used were not very modern, their ideas were pretty good. I even found some embossed print covers published over 40 years ago,” says the publisher, whose own business publishes about 50 books a year.
Most covers feature either a hand drawn illustration or some kind of graphic design, with artist illustrations costing at least K50,000.
“We normally use illustrated covers for novels and fiction,” says U San Oo, but “Graphic designs are suitable for other [book] categories and you can get them for around K20,000 to K30,000,” he adds.
