HEAD BLOG

A question for you: should book covers be relevant?

It’s reasonable to expect that a book’s cover depict the contents of the book. So the answer must be “yes”.

That’s all there is to say. Thank you.

Only, marketing being marketing, that isn’t all there is to say. Not by a long chalk.

The book business stands alongside that of movies in its sophisticated use of cover art. In terms of some of the wider aspects of marketing it can often lag behind other businesses, but when it comes to packaging, books have it… covered (I’m sorry, I’m sorry).

The goal for a piece of cover art is to sell the contents. That means attracting attention so that you and I pick it up and read the back blurb which informs us this is the book for us. That could be done through an exciting précis or by splashing the names of other respected authors beneath favourable quotes. I’ve often wondered how well a book would sell if the back were actually the front, foregoing any pretence at illustration altogether.

Assuming, however, the illustration is in place, what should it depict? Should it be aiming to convey the plotline or should it be a scream, a scream that says “BUY ME”?

There is a lot to resist in the “buy me” approach, artistic integrity not least. One trick of this approach is to follow the best-sellers. My colleague, Carl (@firsthead) discussed this with me recently and observed that standing in one of the hyper-commercial supermarket book stores, one can divide the books up into their follow-me status. It’s like Amazon’s recommended approach. In one block of books you can see the repeated figure of a person walking away from the viewer – from this we know that if we liked Shadow of the Wind we will like this. Then there is a block of books with cathedral arches (gothic, naturally) for the Dan Brownites. Like Jodi Picoult? You’re in luck, the detail of the child’s shoe or partial face, washed in a nostalgic sun – that’s for you. And then of course there are the flat neon tones of the chick lit covers, a handbag, a lipstick, a pair of heels and the drunken typography that once heralded the Club 18-30 holidays and now toned down slightly for the modern fun-loving lady.

At once we are invited to judge the book by its cover. At once we decide whether to investigate further or dismiss entirely as being “for women” or for “light” readers. We are not, in other words, encouraged to look deeper and discover.

Publishers are of course just trying to sell books, in volume. And why wouldn’t they? It’s a business. Many writers these days understand the business of writing; the grit as well as the inspiration. These writers face the commercial truth of publishing. A writer must understand how to sell as well as how to write. Listening to them discuss the business side of writing is a revelation.

So why the surprise when it comes to a cover not reflecting the contents of the book?

One reason, of course, is honesty. In the 80s entire nations of videogamers were well used to routinely being lied to by advertisers. Claims that a game was life-like were, oddly enough, the more honest of ads, accompanied as they were by actual images of the 8×8 characters you were supposed to emote with. Far more common were beautifully painted covers promising worlds undreamt of. These were often supported by “in-game” images that were anything but.

All this didn’t seem to diminish the appetite for battling across new worlds  but book covers speak a different language and live by a different set of rules.

Books cannot be oversold through pictures of exotic slave aliens or sweeping vistas. Their visual power rests in the imagination of the reader who is far more able to understand and accept the “sizzle” of a well designed jacket.

Books can, however, be mis-sold in other ways. Make out that a treatise on 17th Century radicalism in French baking is like Harry Potter and readers may well be slightly miffed. Miffed enough not to be fooled twice even, perhaps, if the author does follow this with the perfect wizard book for all ages.

Another reason authors might not want their books hailed as the next Dan Brown is one of integrity.

Ok. Let’s skip over that one.

A book cover design must promote the author as original whilst showing readers it belongs to something they will feel comfortable reading. It should face down contradictions to be part of a genre and yet stand out in that genre.

So to the first question we asked: relevance? Only if it is relevant.

So, here’s an interesting challenge. You have a game which, as part of its key strengths, features a cast of thousands of fully animated and destructible Zombies. That’s something you might want to tell people about. It’s a pretty impressive message to relate.

It’s not enough. Of course it isn’t. Every publisher wants to create a character, an aspirational figure in whom the consumer will place all their love, affection and spare cash. Dead Rising 2 is no exception and the developers have Chuck, a biker who seems to have cracked the knack of taping objects together in order to form weapons of mad destruction. So he has to go on the pack somewhere.

It’s shaping up to be a crowded mess of a pack really. All too often, games packaging tries to tell the complete story. Look, it says, in one glance you will see that I have cars, gangs, spaceships, soldiers, cats and humour. I have streets you can walk down and buildings you can enter. Yes, all too often, the front of box seems to be unaware that there is, in fact, a back of box to inform.

So the challenge, whenever Head First designs packaging, is to balance everything and make sure the impact isn’t swamped by detail.

The sweet spot of this pack is bang on the centre, on the hero. The title isn’t lost but nor does it dominate and the thousands of zombies… well, they are carefully shepherded by the stadium lights so that they remain as detail and texture.

Above all, the pack retains clarity. The real test, of course, will be in six months when it is lying on a shelf next to twenty other packs. Will it still stand out without a marketing spend to clear away the competition?

Every once in a while someone says something that makes you want to reach for the bucket. The comment is so loaded with pseudo- intellectual sugar  that overdose is instantaneous.

The headline statement here is one such comment. It carries self importance about its person like a student at a sit-in and if you’ve any sense you’ll be walking on by with a shake of your head.

But I see morbid curiosity keeps you here. Quite right too because every criticism of advertising you might have, every design bugbear you hold, all can be answered through that swollen claim.

Advertising and design goes wrong when the creatives and marketeers involved forget that they are problem solvers. Some of them appear to be brand evangelists, others appear to be artists, none of them produce anything like the commercially appropriate work they ought to whilst those millstones hang around their necks.

It’s easy to spot them too. Designs that don’t function as they ought to. Image taking precedence over usability. A complete lack of message.

Watch for them all because in their steely good looks are more bullshit statements than our claim to be problem solvers could ever make.

These says the term ‘brand’ has become a catch all for any company thinking about reaching into the hearts and minds of consumers everywhere. It can be summarized as a logo and, occasionally, a set of principles which the company tries to ring fence as being typically theirs.

It’s easy to see why they take this view of course. The super companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and… ummm… Head First occupy the places in the minds of people that can be identified as ‘brand aware’. When asked, consumers will probably be aware, not only of these companies logos, but also of their ideological standpoints.

What right thinking, emergent company wouldn’t want a piece of this action? To them, getting the brand right leads inexorably to prominence, take-up and financial success.

Allow me to tell you a little story.

A friend of mine started a company providing services to children. On a casual consultancy level, I was asked to chip in on the subject of brand.
My friend was very keen on creating a brand.

I probed a little deeper in order to ascertain what, exactly, was meant by ‘brand’ and, sure enough, the concept appeared to be linked tightly to logo.

That’s not right, I said. Brand is different to design. Think of brand as something you earn through great service and a lot of time. And even then, turning your company into a brand takes a whole lot more than making sure you maintain your logo according to a designer’s style guide.

Look at Coca Cola, I said. That’s a brand. However we may feel about it, whatever we may see in the difference between the public face they market and the reality of their business practices, they can be clearly identified alongside specific values.
And that isn’t because they have slavishly followed design guidelines down the decades. It’s because they have vigorously marketed their product alongside a very particular viewpoint. It has cost hundreds of millions and taken decades.

Even those companies for which brand status has come quicker haven’t fallen into the trap of being restricted design-wise. Their service has come before all else and that is what has shaped any design elements to their promotions.

And those elements have changed over time, adapting, as they should, to changing tastes, expectations and technologies.

So the next time a designer (or a client) insists that you must present everything in a certain colour in order to adhere to brand guidelines, do them a favour and tell them to Google ‘brand’ for a while.

Everyone at Head First, even Jeni, is a big fan of packaging. We work on enough of it to hope beyond hope that print will survive digital downloads and that even vinyl will make a substantial comeback just so we can enjoy the pleasure of owning something tangible again. Opening that iPhone box, unboxing the special edition Modern Warfare 2 – these are things that bring pleasure to the senses and it would be a shame to dismiss this as an unecessary part of the purchasing process.

So we thought it would be nice to show off the latest series of special packs we have designed, this time for Ben 10 Vilgax Attacks.

Isn’t it lovely? Don’t you just want to touch it?

The worst piece of advice, professionally at least, was to throw out the rule book. As a student studying creative writing it seemed a strange sort of direction, especially coming off a module where we’d discussed how Auden was estimated to have tried almost every form of poetic structure going.

To me, rules aren’t there to be broken, not really. I like the way structure (whilst we are on the subject) channels ideas and even informs their exposition. Yep, when it comes to the rule book I’m there chapter and verse.

So it’s always strange when the way you crack a design job wide open is by ignoring rules altogether. Recently we had to think differently for an online job and the best way, we found, was to throw out the rule book.

Sort of.

What we did was to ignore convention by asking ourselves what if this wasn’t an online job. What if it were in a different medium altogether.

It got us thinking.

Differently.

So we still followed rules. Just not the ones we were meant to.

The beautiful thing about working with video games is the sheer range of subjects you get to cover. One minute you are working on a sci-fi game and the next you are producing visuals for a cookery app. “Normal” agencies don’t get to flit around the product gamut as we do. It means that even though some companies see as as “specialist” others see the experience that we bring.

So when MBN Events came knocking we were pleased to put on our Sport Billy hat and begin producing the kind of exciting visuals that have helped sell games for UEFA, WWE, Race Pro and many other titles that in a normal world would take all the energies of top agencies.

Head First approach work in the same way, regardless of client size. We take a look at the consumer market in which such products rest and create imagery and ideas that measure up to the standard of quality expected whilst also standing out in terms of recognisable identity. Again, coming from the video game industry where every (for example) war game can look the same we have found that being distinctive can make all the difference.

For MBN we have begun producing high quality visuals to continue their already high quality approach for both print and video.

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We’ve been following the series of articles about cover art over at Kotaku very closely indeed. Here at Head First we understand that cover art is a vital part of the marketing mix. For some games it is the only form of advertising a game will get and so conveying the right degree of quality and content is essential.

It’s not, of course, the last word. The under-discussed back of box is an area that serves a vitaly important role in helping consumers decide whether or not the game is for them (and this goes for pretty much any related product subject to the whims of casual browsing – books, films especially).

If you’ve not read our ‘hilarious’ take on the process of buying games then you can catch up here.

Right. The laughs are dying down and it’s time to outline a few of the reasons why the back of box is so important.

It’s estimated that 40% of purchases are impulse. That’s a pretty big chunk of people deciding right there and then to buy a game. They could be gamers who have a vague idea of the sort of game they are looking for or they could be Ma and Pa, looking to buy a game because little Johnny has eaten his peas.

Now that’s a pretty diverse audience right there but let’s assume they have all missed your advertising campaign, or at least that it’s not the influencing factor. Price and packaging are key factors in this (showing how a proper sales strategy – something games don’t do that well – and cover art is important).

It’s the back of pack that is interesting because that can make a real difference here. Ma and Pa may well be looking for cover art that resembles what they’ve seen before so they will be drawn to “that sort of thing”. That means they will be picking up the box and taking a closer look. They need to be impressed and convinced that the game will be right.

The back of box can do this by being impressive and by being clear as to its message. Great visuals will give an idea of what the game will look like but how do you go about doing that? Is one big screenshot better than five smaller ones? One might be impressive but five smaller ones might give a better impression of the varied gameplay. Then again, five smaller screens might get lost in translation as the detail becomes too small to make out so maybe you opt for a montage of screens to make, in essence, a new piece of cover art derived completely from the game itself.

Or maybe you get brave and decide that your screenshots look pretty much the same as those of the competitor. That’s not an unreasonable stance to take. Nor is it anything to be ashamed of. The quality of games these days is remarkable. Having something “just” as good as the competitor isn’t bad, it’s “just as good”. And even if it is only marginally better – is that really noticeable in the screenshots or do the elements that make it better come across during your involvement?

In which instance you can see a strong case for doing something different on the back of box. Making an argument, or a claim – “Makes Modern Warfare 2 Look Like Jet Set Willy” you might opt for over a simpler image just to show that your visuals are amazing too.

There’s no correct route.

The decisions made when designing the back of box art depend on all the questions, all the intended audience data and the ultimate goal of the publisher.

Ok, so your customer has seen the ad you placed in obscure.weekly, made the effort to view your clever viral email featuring the talking monkey, wandered over to view the game trailer and then waited for two hours in order to get a bus into the city centre where they rushed into the nearest video game store and began hunting for the dazzling box art they have now committed to memory thanks to it featuring heavily on all your communications. You couldn’t afford to wallpaper the store with it but that’s ok, your customer knows what to look for thanks to a bit of clever wordplay on the ads. Copywriting, as we all know, is the ONLY thing that matters when it comes to marketing.

After ten minutes rearranging the stock on the shelf so that the first letter of each game now spells out a pretty rude word followed by “lol”, your customer has the box in his hands.

Life is good. Close this one sale through the power of marketing and you’re on your way to LA and the big time. Screw the PR, this was all your doing.

But wait. Is that a wobble? Is that doubt creeping into the customer’s mind? It’s been a few hours since he last connected to the Internet and, well, attention spans aren’t what they used to be. Times gone by would see us retaining information from before conception but these days we’re lucky if we remember what we lol’d about on our last Facebook update let alone what game we were about to buy.

Hang on. Where was I?

Oh yes, thank god for Outlook tasks.

He has the box but there’s a wobble. The pack next to yours, by chance of titling and the newly arranged order of things alone, has a pretty similar looking design. The competition’s robot looks even shinier though. And it has a woman standing next to it. Damn, why didn’t you think of that? You have women in your game and the lack of a shiny robot was SUPPOSED to convey the intensity of the battle. You really dropped the ball on that decision didn’t you? Two robots, one battle scarred and one shiny might have done the trick.

So what have you got up your sleeve to nudge the customer in the right direction? In your direction? There has to be something? Online advertising won’t work here. The POS is only being displayed in Bulgaria and the store manager, well, you’ll sort him out once the sequel to last year’s mostly successful game comes out. Then he’ll learn what purchasing power means.

At least the customer is still holding your pack. That’s something isn’t it? If he’s not distracted anytime in the next five seconds then chances are his eyes will get back to it. They have to at some point in order to successfully put it down. You factored for that right? Replacing packaging on the shelf can be a pivotal purchasing moment.

It’s not looking good. Although… that, there. Is that a twist of the hand? Yes. It is. The customer is flipping your game over and looking at the BACK OF PACK. Oh beautiful. This is where you’re home and dry. This is where 80% of your budget went because you knew that this is the meat of the matter. If cover art is the brawn then back art is the brains. And nobody marries the brawn. Right?

Let’s move on.

On the back you’ve thought about the information. Properly. This is where the customer begins to consume information. This is where they learn that there are TWO robots and ONE woman in the game. That’s good. He likes robots but couldn’t deal with more than one woman in a game. It’s not a game for girls.

You’ve thought of the three best features in the game and explained them v e r y  c l e a r l y in 4 words or less. You’ve added every variation of screenshot to make sure he knows that there are different terrains, different enemies, multiplayer, single player, puzzle solving, action sequences, storytelling, customisation, personalisation, social networking features, voice activated missile silos, dressing up sections (in armour because this isn’t, y’know, a girl’s game), rollercoaster high adrenaline, face shaking, ball shrinking, horror comedy tragedy grandparent friendly motiondetectingdancecrazysingtillyourvoicebreaksthen come-out-fighting-with-the-girl-on-your-arm-and-the-robots-beneath-your-personally-selected-boots gameplay.

Yep. When it comes to weaving a compelling argument around that back of pack we can safely say you’ve covered every base.

Hold on a minute. He’s put it down. He was only pretending to look at the game whilst he checked out the cute girl choosing her PS3 game in the aisle opposite.

Didn’t think of THAT now did you?

Working with the new breed of developer publisher has been an exciting challenge. In a world of digital downloads how are you going to make your product stand out? Do you confine your promotions solely to the online world or do you learn from companies such as Google and utilise the power of old media and the attention it still attracts?

At Head First we ask all of these questions and help shape the creative campaign to suit the product and the client. With The Mysteries of Little Riddle we have been lucky enough to bring our skills to this issue and create a series of images that are sales focussed.

And luckily there is still great fun to be had in creating real world objects.