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Discover How a Retro Book Cover Design Can Help Your Book Be More Popular
As far as cover art styles for books go, retro book cover ideas are some of the most popular ones on the market today. Whether it’s a children’s book, or even a fantasy book set in a medieval era, this style of art can be a massive asset in helping your design add some character to it.
The question is – why? In today’s world, where digital has reached a level where its possible to create animations and illustrations that are hard to differentiate from real life, why would someone willingly go for something vintage?
Well, there are many reasons as to why a designer and author would agree to a retro-style cover art for their book. It could be something as simple as matching the plot setting of the book, or it could be something deeper like harnessing the nostalgia that comes with these designs to get readers to pick the book up.
However, it takes a subtle, experienced hand to incorporate a vintage or retro vibe into your cover art, without it looking old and outdated itself. And that’s where you need the help of a professional eBook design services provider.
So how would you go about ideating your retro book cover design? Well, you would need some inspiration to serve as a starting point for you. So let’s dive in and take a look at some retro-styled cover art, and see what design ideas would work well for your book cover.
Retro Children Book Covers
As we mentioned earlier, retro book covers can be used in a variety of different genres of books. However, we are going to discuss only those genres where these vintage style cover art are used extensively.
The first genre on our list is retro children’s book cover ideas. Children’s books come in a variety of options, from bright picture books, to nursery rhymes collections, and even short stories. As such, the art of creating book covers for children books offers a lot of creative freedom, in terms of what elements to add and how to use them.
However, there is one caveat – the book’s cover art should be attractive and endearing for the children. And although that might seem like an easy enough task, it’s easier said than done. So how can you go about it successfully?
Let’s take a look at a couple of retro book cover ideas for children, and see how they have managed to incorporate that vantage yet timeless feel to their designs.
Hey Diddle Diddle – Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes
The first book on our list is that for one of the most well-known collection of children’s nursery rhymes, known as Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes. This specific book is named after a popular nursery rhyme, called Hey Diddle Diddle, or The Cat and the Fiddle.
If you look at the cover for this book, you will see that there seems to be a lot going on in terms of imagery. And if you are not familiar with the nursery rhyme the book is named after, it may seem somewhat unrelated. However, for those in the know, this serves as a clever callback to the word of the poem, adding to the overall fun of the design.
The hand-drawn style of art, including the cow jumping over the moon, the dapperly suited cat and little dog, and even the dish running away with the spoon has a certain wonky, yet charming feel to it. This style of retro art may be of a lower quality than the ones that can be created by digital design tools, but they have a certain nostalgic feel to them that makes them so endearing.
Sherlock Holmes – The Adventure of the Speckled Band
The next book whose cover we are going to discuss is a story about fiction’s most famous detective character, Sherlock Holmes. The book is called “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, and it can be found in the anthology “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”.
The style of this book cover is one that is often found in the comic book cover ideas from the 60s or 70s, where the cover art had a distinctive hand-drawn, pencil art vibe to it. This cover specifically, represents one of the more mysterious and entertaining stories from the collection, where the reader is left guessing until almost the end of the story. And it does the story justice by just hinting at the reveal for the sharp-eyed readers. Overall, this is one of the most iconic retro book cover ideas on this list.
Vintage-Style Book Cover Art
There’s retro book covers, and then there are truly vintage book cover designs. Most people have a hard time differentiating between retro and vintage designs for cover art. And to them, we only have one thing to say – we understand why.
Retro book cover ideas follow a style that gives your cover art a certain retro feel. Yet despite that, your book cover design is decidedly modern. However, when we talk about vintage book covers, they use design elements and aesthetics that doesn’t just incorporate a retro fell into a modern design, but wholeheartedly embody their vintage vibe.
So what if you are tasked with designing a new cover for a popular book first published almost a century ago? Would you opt for a purely modern design, or would you go for cover art that honors the legacy and history of the book? Of course, it would be the latter.
Let’s take a look at some of the best vintage-style book covers to inspire your design.
The War of the Worlds
When it comes to vintage books that are still popular, few top works written by H. G. Wells. Written by an author known as the “father of science fiction” this book, along with another masterpiece by the name of “The Time Machine” started the phenomenon that was later named the science fiction genre.
Written around the turn towards the 20th century, these books introduced concepts and ideas that were later termed almost prophetic by many people, including scientists like Leo Szilard and Einstein. This specific book, called The War of the Worlds, relates the story of earth’s inhabitants waging a war for their lives and planet against an invading alien species.
For this version of cover art, the book distinctly delineates the imagery with the rest of the book cover’s design. The image looks like a charcoal drawing on a piece of heavy drawing paper, which has a distinct yellow-brown tinge to it like that of old parchment. The steampunk-style art depicting a large, tripod-legged alien robot firing a ray gun makes for some great vintage imagery, especially when combined with the heavy, serif vintage fonts used for the cover’s typography.
The Jungle Book
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling is a book that has been reprinted a number of times, due to the sheer demand and popularity of it. Most of us have read it at one time or another during our childhood, most often from relatively modern reprints. That is why many of people do not consider the book a vintage, despite the fact that it fulfills all the requirements of being one.
However, some of the higher-end reprints are designed to embody that vintage feel, such as the one above. To give it that vintage vibe, the design uses a canvas base colored a dark, forest green, with a slightly faded look to give it a sense of aged history. Next, the embossed art on it, depicting the forest scene is decidedly retro, which is then rounded off with a loopy font done in a shiny golden paint often found on old book covers. Overall, this is one of the best retro art book cover ideas you could emulate.
Retro Horror Book Covers
One of the earliest book genres to have proper cover art was the horror genre. From titles like Bram Stoker’s Dracula to R.L. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are great examples of this phenomenon. The horror genre is one that needs to portray the horror element, without making the design too visceral. That means that unlike many different genres, the horror genre needs an experienced hand.
Let’s take a look at some great examples of retro book cover ideas from the horror genre, and see how they have managed to be such a massive success.
The Island of Dr. Moreau
The Island of Doctor Moreau is an amazing novel written by H. G. Wells that fits perfectly into the realm of science fiction/horror. Narrated by the character Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man rescued by a passing boat and put ashore a seemingly uninhabited island serving as a base for mad scientist Dr. Moreau.
While the book may seem like an avid fantasy, it is actually an allegory about the nature of humankind, and the cruelty we display despite considering ourselves better and more evolved than the “animals”. And that cover displays that quite well. The name of the book doesn’t hint at the theme or genre of the book, so its up to the book cover to do that.
The design is done using a retro-style design that looks like a scene painted using watercolors. The scene depicts the protagonist wandering through the jungle, stopping dead in his tracks when he sees a human-animal hybrid hiding behind a tree while stalking him. The bestial visage of the humanoid hybrid and the horror on the protagonist’s face depicts the genre of the book perfectly, and hints at the theme of the story too. Overall, this is one of the best examples of book covers that force people to pick up the book to discover the context.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one book that many of us are familiar with, written by famed author Robert Louis Stevenson. It tells the story of a Victorian man named Dr. Jekyll, a bachelor who is plagued by various amoral vices. Ashamed of them and afraid that their exposure would result in his fall from societal status, he devises a chemical serum that allowed him to transform his body into a smaller, unrecognizable form.
This too serves as an allegorical tale of the lengths men will go to hide and suppress their vices and urges. Yet no matter how clever you may be, your hubris will be your downfall. Dr Jekyll, in all his brilliance, thought that by creating a chemically transformed version of himself, he could keep on indulging in his vices while maintaining his status in high society. However, in the end, that alter ego itself bought about his end, both physically and metaphorically.
Coming back to its cover, it is one of the best drawing book covers ideas we have seen so far. The depiction of Mr Hyde has a sinister vibe to it that perfectly encapsulates the nature of that character. Moreover, the depiction of a super-sized Mr Hyde against a small image of the dapper Dr Jekyll shows the conflict of the man’s two warring natures, with the wild one coming out on top.
Retro Book Covers with Ornate Vibe
There are many other retro book cover ideas besides the ones we have seen so far. And one of the styles that is popular among fans of this niche are the ornately designed book covers that add a certain premium feel to their books.
A few decades ago, especially before the popularity of paperback as a bookbinding medium, most books had a hard cover to them. In the era before the advent of digital printing and digital art, bookbinders looked for other ways to make their books seem unique and attractive. They used elements like embossing with precious metals like gold, metallic filigree, and even inlaying to decorate those cover.
However, today, those same techniques are recreated digitally without the need for all those separate elements, thus reducing and effort needed to get that book printed and bound. So, let’s take a look at a few examples to see how we can replicate that ornate style in our cover art for that perfect retro look.
Soyer’s Shilling Cookery for the People
Soyer’s Shilling Cookery for the People is a kitchen-help book written in the mid-19th century by celebrity chef Alexis Soyer. The book was designed to help people find recipes and techniques to cook food with ease and versatility, allowing for people living in large cities like London and New York to adopt plain living.
The design of the book is decidedly vintage and ornate, having a cover that has carved wood with metal inlays decorating the book cover. This elaborate style of cover art, while somewhat common in that era when each bookseller meant to outdo their competition, adds to the overall appeal of the book in today’s age. Moreover, the carved/burned wooden letters on a designed ribbon banner at the center of the cover makes it one of the top typography book cover ideas on this list.
Frankenstein
The final book on our list here is Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, called Frankenstein. At a glance, the charcoal black color of the book serves as a great backdrop for the cover art and the typography over it. At the top of the cover is the name of the book in ornate, serif typography. At the bottom of the cover, you see the names of the author, the illustrator, and the introducing author, all in the same white as the title, with the secondary text being in a metallic gold color.
At the center of the book was designed an ornate frame, in the style of old wrought-iron window frames for stained glass. Through this frame, as if through a window, the viewer sees a grotesque humanoid creature far larger than normal, looming over another man and grabbing him by his collar.
This book cover is one of the best examples of perfectly embodying a vintage style of a story or a book into its design, where even the trained eye has a hard time differentiating it from the real deal. In fact, had it not been for the little clues, as well as the discussion being going on, even we would have had a hard time finding out the differences. Overall, this is one of the best book cover ideas on this list – period.
FAQs
| How can you make a book cover look vintage or retro? Most old books and their covers tend to take on a sepia tinge, which can be replicated using a digital variation of tea-staining technique used by bookmakers to give a new book a vintage feel. |
| Why are retro book cover ideas so popular in the cover art community? Retro or vintage books have a certain character to them, a history behind them that appeals to the reader. Think about it from their perspective. Here’s a book that someone has kept safe and loved for decades, far longer than you would expect someone to keep a mediocre book. This results in a certain appeal to them, that allows them to be picked up for reading by new consumers. |
Conclusion
To sum it up, there are several styles to choose from when it comes to retro book cover ideas. From children and comic book style, all the way to typographic cover art, you can give your book cover a vintage in a several different ways.
However, not every style can be used to represent your book’s cover art. Some of them, such as art book styles, can only be used for certain types of fiction genres, if you want anyone to take your book seriously. Therefore, its important that your book covers be suited to your book’s genre and vibe, so that your readers find picking up the book fulfilling.
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