Reflection 5

The first book cover that instantly comes to my mind is the edition of "The Catcher in the Rye" that's famously bloated with some of the most intense motifs from the novel itself. The reason that I find it so memorable isn’t because it necessarily popped out when I first saw it, but because of how cleverly designed it seemed after reading through the book and identifying the individual parts of the cover. What originally seemed to be a few colorful images of menial objects in the book turned out to be a much more significant illustration of some of the book’s most prominent themes, linked together in one image.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that all book covers need to borrow from this business model; book covers follow very few specific credentials, and leave so much room for the artists to get as creative as they want. It doesn’t need to be fraught with the book’s most important symbolic imagery, and in most cases it’s probably better not to, because few will understand it. A visual representation of a single scene can do a book just as much justice as the cover of the Catcher in the Rye, so long as it’s designed to draw people to look at the back. The Catcher's cover designed to be memorable, not to pop out like most covers should.