Cover Design: Why It Matters.

Mon. April 15, 2013 Update: I saw this article from New York Times "T" Magazine, with "an illuminating cross section of 83 years of book design" for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby."  

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We DO judge a book by its cover. 

Sad, but true.

The cover is an invitation to "enter" the publication.

The most important sales tool at your disposal is the cover of your book (ebook, white paper, presentation, annual report). Make it noteworthy! 

Your cover design should be approached with the same mindset used by product marketing and creative teams. Product packaging drives purchasing decisions for the thousands of products on the market. A book is a product. The cover will be judged as an indication of the quality of the content.

Good, think GREAT, cover design will make you linger, soaking up the imagery, type and layout. You may even run you hand slowly across the cover. Even in our digital world, pausing ever so slightly to enjoy a cover design and when interactivity is added... it's still tactile. 

While cover design varies from business-to-business (B2B) versus consumer (B2C); the end result is still the same. It MOTIVATES.

Check out Chip Kidd's TED Talk "Designing books is no laughing matter. OK. It is."

Below are a few guidelines that can help differentiate your cover.

• Kindle Interest: The cover is the reaction to "tell me more." It's the invitation to enter, learn more, travel to new places, explore ideas, etc. Good cover design requires research and study. Testing structure, placement of elements, image selections, fonts and color palette. 
• Identifies With Your Audience: Understanding your target audience and sharing that profile with your designer is imperative. Your designer will develop concepts that should appeal to your audience.
• Visual Overview: Is the cover a reflection of the theme? It doesn't matter if we're selling our company's features and/or benefits or telling a fictional story; the cover of the publication should be a visual overview.
• Convey An Idea (Emotion): The cover should be more than an afterthought to package the contents. It should be the forethought. Sparking the motivation to turn the cover is how we get to the "tell me more" motivation.
• Make It "Top Drawer": The accessibility to do-it-yourself is everywhere and we recognize the work of a true professional. As a minimum, invest in a professionally designed cover. After all... it will be your primary marketing tool for your book or publication.

Reference links:

Creative Blog 10 Imaginative Annual Report Designs
http://www.creativebloq.com/graphic-design/annual-report-design-2131905

New York Times Favorite Cover Design of 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/12/19/books/20favorite-book-covers.html

Design. Digitize. Distribute.

10.18.11 Update: I recently learned PDFs are, and have been since 2001, indexed by Google.

I'm interested in how businesses can distribute and share their documents & publications across various platforms, versus keeping a monthly newsletter trapped in its PDF filing cabinet or parked in an email. We're now able to publish on platforms that are accessible to our audience regardless of device.

Additional products/services will be rolled out over the next few weeks, too.   As a designer who enjoys the convergence of text + imagery, I've been concerned about quality on your monitor, smart phone or tablet; but I think that argument is mostly extinguished as technology improves every day.

Creative Aces' Digital Publishing Services is on online publishing, viewer and analytical platform powered by Issuu. The features offered at PRO level have the potential to increase readership and feedback from your own list plus Issuu's 33 Million monthly readers. As we begin to bridge the desktop-to-tablet technology, additional features of this platform include:

• Customize the viewer with logo, icons, colors, animations
• Remove the advertising sidebar on embedded and standalone publications
• Newsstand/library to display and monetize your publications
• Organize documents and distribute your content
• Bulk upload for uploading hundreds of publications
• Auto-embedding to automatically embed latest edition
• Detailed statistics and reporting
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and high Google ranking
• Active links to websites, email links and advertisers
• Add audio/video to your documents or presentation

We can get the process started with previously published documents and begin building a library of materials outside of the corporate server or a "jump drive."

Here's a just a few ideas: Investment profile or white paper, quarterly earnings presentation, sales presentation, annual report, monthly newsletter, portfolio, "look" book, etc. in which we could build a direct marketing campaign and track the results.

Joann

A Winning Combination for B2B Content Distribution

Looking for a simple, cost-effective solution to distribute your message beyond your list?
Marketing gurus call it 'silo' jumping or simply put expanding your target list. I prefer to think of it as casting a wider net since the landscape for targeting your audience now includes social media.
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SlideShare & LinkedIn = Winning Combination

View more presentations from Creative Aces

Let me explain. I'm referring to LinkedIn. (This is NOT a case study about Twitter or Facebook).
LinkedIn has become the silent giant for business professionals, if you haven't created an account I urge you to do so immediately. And, if you own your own company or work for a company -- get a company profile set up.

• 81.8 Million Monthly Visitors
• 7.1 BILLION Page Views (Monthly)
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• Executives from ALL FORTUNE 500 Companies
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• Mobile-friendly

Add SlideShare to create a winning combo!

• 50 Million Monthly Visitors
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• Mobile-friendly

Make sure you add the SlideShare app to your LinkedIn profile so your presentation or other content appears on your page. We should craft our marketing strategies to include content creation and curation.
References:
SlideShare Deepens Ties With LinkedIn (PC World)
Social Media Marketing By The Numbers [INFOGRAPHIC] (Mashable)