Random Thoughts On Design

Further thoughts on "Hack the Cover" by Craig Mod:

Mod isn't the only person in the world who believes that book covers are dead. It's been quite the debate ever since e-books rolled around. I don't believe they're fully dead... I mean books are still being made, we are just moving on to the next big thing -- technology.

I believe the same concept of a book cover hasn't diminished. The idea behind it is a powerful and captivating design that simply describes the book while capturing the audience's attention. We do essentially 'judge a book by it's cover'. Although, we may not be doing this with books so much anymore, but we definitely are with the applications we purchase for our devices. We've talked about it multiple times in class and have admitted, I myself has as well, that sometimes we purchase apps just for the sake of a beautifully made icon even though we don't know much about it.

After reading the article "Why Should Books Still Be Books When They're on Tablets?" by Steven Heller I'm left with some contradicting thoughts. We are grasping to the idea of a book when creating story applications because we're skeptical of the outcomes if we get too creative. Replicating some of the same functions of a book when creating these enhanced e-books seems like we are holding ourselves back so much from what could be infinitely created.

Now thinking of our assignment. The basic fundamentals of book design are so important for the audience's experience that the same applies to electronic books as well. So really, book covers are not dead. Instead we are just judging design in a different way (application icons and every single 'page' and detail of the enhanced e-book) and we are being more harsh about it because there's more to focus on.

P.S. One more thought, in the Mod reading it also talks about how there's less bookshelves appearing and books fighting for attention. As a result there's loud covers exploding yelling "LOOK AT ME!". In my opinion, it's exponentially more tough for enhanced e-books to get noticed and downloaded. There may be thousands of bookstores around the world, but there's only a handful of app stores.