On Book Design - Sloane

     I'm someone who always chooses books based on their cover -- I'm sure many others are, too. Over the years I've found that this usually works out for me. Covers are supposed to be representative of the stories inside, after all. In Chip Kidd's TED Talk video about book cover design, I got to see a bit of the thought process/creativity behind this. It seems quite straightforward -- take a central aspect of the book (whether this is a plot point, an idea, or the format of the writing itself) and creatively transpose this concept into visual design. But I think this process goes in the other direction as well. What I mean is, as a reader, I find my perception of the story being impacted by the cover. Since it's the first thing I see, its visual acts as a sort of background music for the text as I read, and I use it to hone the mental images brought about by the words inside. It becomes something of a confirmation bias in that the cover sets up an expectation that my mind then seeks to fulfill. For instance, if the cover of a book is a mysterious, misty blue, I might interpret a simple but vague dialogue spoken by a character to be profound and deep, but if the cover was plain and beige instead, I might take the exact same dialogue to just feel incomplete and lacking. In this way, I would argue the cover is as much a part of the reading experience as the words themselves (the publishers mentioned in Bosman's "Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers" article seem to agree, although for somewhat different reasons). To put it simply, packaging matters. In class we already saw this with how the marketing for the movie version of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 varied from country to country. I think this has the potential to complicate the job of translation a bit. On one hand, there's little an individual translator can probably do to influence how a publisher chooses to package the story, so maybe they just do their work as usual and then hope the story still feels the same no matter how its physical form is presented. But, on the other hand, if a cover design is picked out in the middle of the translation process, I wonder if a translator can't help but be influenced by its design to some extent, either subconsciously or through overt direction from a publisher.