To: [Tim Cox]
Subject: Re: Good to see you at the conference 
Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2001 03:50:21 -0400
From: Mark Jason Dominus <mjd@plover.com>


>  In terms of a cover, we have pretty good designers and we can work in a    
>  variety of directions. You mentioned that you would not like a simple      
>  abstract cover reminiscent of textbooks- that is easy to avoid. One way to 
>  approach this is to determine the type of treatment that you find most     
>  appealing: Abstract (can be done elegantly without the textbook-look),     
>  Type- only treatment (can be very successful), Illustrative (Artists' work 
>  that you like, or example) Photographic (images can be figurative or       
>  abstract, we can have a designer research a particular vision or abstract  
>  description of the content for images that would fit) For this book, the   
>  overall idea would be to capture the elegance & power of these techniques  
>  with the accessible nature of your presentation and of the perl audience.  


I did a lot of thinking about this and realized I don't like the
covers of most books.  I surveyed most of the computer books in my
office and found very few covers I liked.  

The cover of Garey and Johnson "Computers and Intractibility" was my
favorite of the computer books.  It is from the school of thought that
says you should take the most interesting-looking interior diagram and
put it on the cover.  Lots and lots of computer and mathematics books
do this.  

There's something to be said for this strategy, I think.  When I see
covers like this, I often want to flip through the book to find out
what the diagram is about.  

But I also feel that it displays a failure of imagination.  Too many
covers look like afterthoughts, as if someone suddenly realized that
the cover design had to be ready in two hours, and said "Oh no, we
have to come up with a cover illustration by 2 PM!  I know, we can use
the diagram on page 179."

I like Duane Bibby's illustrations for "The TeXbook".  I do not like
that they re-used the interior illustrations.  I wish they had paid
him a little extra to do a separate cover illustration.

I like the cover of Hennessey and Patterson "Computer Architecture: A
Quantitative Approach", but I hope my book won't look so austere.  The
cover reminds me of Tufte's "Visual Display of Quantitative
Information".

Kernighan and Ritchie "The C Programming Language" I do not like at
all.  It's white, with a big blue 'C'.  I must admit that the design
is right for the book, though.  If you're writing The One True Book
About C, you want to put an authoritative-looking C on the cover.

So far my least favorite is Kernighan and Pike 'Software Tools', which
is white, with 'Software Tools' in orange, the authors' names, and a
blurb.  

    [ Note added 2012: I later realized that part of the problem was that
      the blurb purported to be a quotation from the book, but actually
      wasn't, and it was written much worse than it would have been had
      Kernighan actually written it. ]

I like the colors on the cover of Norvig's "Paradigms of Artificial
Intelligence Programming", but I'm ambivalent about the cover as a
whole.

Enough negativity.  After some searching, I was able to make a list of
book covers I've really liked.  Then I found samples for you.

I put them at 

        http://hop.perl.plover.com/coverart/

if you want to see.  

Some observations: I seem to like bright colors and jewel tones.  I
seem to dislike earth tones.

I like when the cover depicts something which is thematically related
to the content of the book, without necessarily being a direct
representation of anything in particular.  This is the great genius of
the O'Reilly animal covers, I think.  They can put something
suggestive on the cover without patronizing the reader the way the K&R
book with the giant 'C' does.

I hope this is helpful and not excessively specific.

-D.