The Cover is the Solution

2023-08-31 Invite Champions Weekly

Photo by Guido Coppa on Unsplash

At the time, no one paid attention.

Steve Jobs was just the desperate head of a computer company with a measly 2% market share. The thousands of television executives in the ballroom, with their three piece suits and shiny shoes, had no reason to believe Steve in his black mockneck and jeans, or his computer nerd sidekick with the middle part, had anything to offer.

It was the only time I ever heard Jobs speak live. 100,000 people were packed into the Last Vegas Convention Center for the 1998 NAB Convention. Jobs had just returned to Apple Computer, and had come to the stage to debut his new video player, QuickTime. The audience of establishment industry executives was skeptical at best. It was the age of Friends and Seinfeld, and they were riding high. To them, business was hardware and advertising. Packaging didn’t matter.

The convention center exterior was covered in 30 foot tall banners with the new Apple ad campaign, “Think Different.” What the executives inside didn’t see that day was the vision Jobs had for the personal consumer video experience. The new QuickTime Player was the first salvo in an entirely new viewing experience. Within 15 years, his company would take down the entire broadcast television industry.

Jobs understood the power of packaging.

Last week I introduced some thoughts about packaging, specifically book cover design. If you didn’t get a chance to see it, go back: it tells about the rise of packaging, the emergence of paperbacks, and the trust role a cover image plays in communicating with a potential reader.

But there is a part two to the rise of cover design. With the branded box, and the product or idea that the art represented, another new development: As we became accustomed to illustrated packaging, the illustration itself began to take on greater meaning.

Packaging is About Solutions

Good packaging is more than illustration. It is about design, and design is about a solution. Ever wonder about the difference is between art and design? The purpose of art is to raise questions. The purpose of design is to give solutions.

This week’s bottom line: The best covers are more than pretty pictures. They capture the essence of the book in visual form.

In a career full of innovation, Jobs’ endearing legacy may be the insight that the power of design is its ability to represent an idea which is a solution to a consumer problem. In the Walter Isaacson biography of Jobs, Isaacson captures this quote from Jobs:

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.”¹

Most creators, including authors, dismiss design as the icing of a core object or idea. A sweet but inessential finish. As Isaacson points out, in most companies, engineering drives design. Those who make the product determine what the product will do first, then base its design on the product’s features. They employ an outside-in approach. The result in Job’s industry, for those old enough to remember, was boring beige.

If you write a book based on features, the result is almost always going to be boring beige.

On the other hand, what if you find the right design? The right visual hook? What if you base the book on features, but on the solution?

When I was at Abingdon Press, I helped a Japanese-American United Methodist bishop craft a book to improve the leadership skills of the leaders in his care. His material read like a dissertation. The concepts were solid but typical. One key concept repeatedly surfaced in the material: leadership can be improved. As I read it, I remembered the word kaizen, a post-World War II corporate concept that many credit with the resurrection of the Japanese economy. It is a compound word: the first symbol, 改, “kai,” means “to change, to correct;” the second symbol, 善, “zen,” means “good.”

Together, kaizen roughly means, “continuous correction and improvement.” I suggested a new title: Spiritual Kaizen: How to Become a Better Church Leader. For the cover, we used Japanese symbols to create striking images that helped the leaders remember the key message.

Takeaway: The right image becomes a metaphor with the potential to shape the book’s thesis.

While it’s good to find an image, it’s even better if you can do it before you get to the end of the process. The earlier, the better.

Even in the early days at Apple, Jobs built the box first, not last, then made his engineers conform to it. In some ways this sounds ridiculous and counter-intuitive. You might scoff at this idea. Apple’s engineers apparently did. Most other companies do, too, reasonably assuming that you have to know the basics of the product before you can begin to design it. Yet their products were average at best.

True design is inside-out. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers. In other words,  the image becomes the book. It comes to represent the essence of the solution you’re offering.

2. Championing Invite

One of my goals as Invite Press publisher is to help our authors begin to think as designers. Sometimes this takes more than one book to stick. Sometimes, serendipities emerge.

Our first national (non-local, non-beta level) book contract went to Robert Glenn Johnson. Robert originally brought five treatments, one of which was called Blueprint Jesus. It was to be a book of essays to explore a re-interpretation of Jesus as the blueprint for human life, human community, and our understanding of God. While I believed in Robert as a writer, I knew this wasn’t the final metaphor. He had discovered some good features, but had yet to discover the core essence of the work. I pushed him to think more about it.

One day, I picked up the phone and heard his excited voice on the other end.

“I got it!” Robert exclaimed.

He then walked me through what was to become the core image of the book, based on the gospel story of Jesus’ inability to do any miracles in his hometown: chains. The title became Jesus Unchained, and the final cover a beautiful image of a chain transforming into a butterfly. It is still one of my favorite covers.

Packaging is more than illustration. A good cover design represents a metaphor which both illustrates and illuminates the core idea.

If you’re working on a project now, do you have the cover image finalized?

Ask yourself this: in a single image, what is the essence of the solution you intend to share with the world?

1. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 344.