From Posters to Thumbnails
The Rise and Fall of Covers
As a kid in the eighties, I loved to pore through the album collections of my friend’s older brothers. The albums were typically metal or hard rock: KISS, Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Def Leppard, AC/DC, and so on.
The art was catnip for boys: boobs, horror or sci fi-style imagery, many of them seemed from the universe of Conan The Barbarian.
Cover of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell
I never actually heard Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell, but I spent a long time staring at its cover. Looking at it now, the funny thing is there’s actually not much going on. My imagination created depths that weren’t there.
These covers were little worlds to explore as you immersed in the music. They were scary, intriguing, beautiful, exciting, funny, and sometimes elusive. They only suggested. Your imagination did all the heavy lifting. They were inspiring.
Cover of Supertramp’s Breakfast in America
Later I started to explore the rotating racks of paperback books that were common at many stores. Like so many others, the first covers to lure me in were Stephen King books, like Pet Semetary.
Cover of Stephen King’s Pet Semetary
Then I graduated to literary fiction. Long before I’d seen any of the hype about Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, I already wanted to read it based on its bold and intriguing cover.
Cover of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections
Movie posters were the most grandiose and dramatic of cover art. Initially, I’d just get minutes with them as I waited in line at movie theaters, but eventually, I could saunter through rows of VHS cassettes, gazing at covers and imagining what each film had in store.
Original Bladerunner movie poster
Covers were your first experience of new and unknown frontiers. You’d flick among covers, searching for a world you wanted to enter.
Several media revolutions later
With nothing but a single thumb, we continue to flick through covers decades later. We now have more covers than ever and they remain powerful instruments of intrigue. But now they’re small and infinite.
You used to feel you were in an archive, with the musty odor of ink and decaying wood. Now you feel like you’re seeing code in The Matrix.
The modern cover browsing experience on YouTube
Covers are highly optimized for engagement and ruthlessly efficient. We’re flooded with crazy faces, bright saturated colors, white outlines, arrows, split screens, clickbaity snippets of text.
There’s no pondering anymore. We flick, we tap. It’s like Tinder for entertainment.
So how do you recapture the old magic? It’s actually easy: head to your local bookstore, used or new, or the library. Book shops and libraries overflow with gorgeous modern covers and classics. If you’re wondering where you can find the best, most inspiring graphic art, just go walk among the aisles.
The cover of Never Let Me Go, a classic of modern literary fiction