SLAP HAPPY LARRY

There’s a style of art and illustration, frequently seen on book covers, and I have no idea what to call it. Let’s call it the hand-lettered or hand-drawn look. Once I line these covers up together, I start to see what unites this style of graphic design:

• The text is often caps or small caps, or it might be an oblique brush script font, or actually hand-lettered by the designer
• There may be some kind of distress on the typography; either the sides are a bit wobbly or there’s some sort of texture embedded into the font
• This style avoids gradients and layer effects such as shadows and glows
• But the designer has probably played with the baseline of the text, or reshaped it to fit around (or inside) the art
• Colours are solid (no blend modes)
• Looks as if it might have been made on an old fashioned printing press
• Colour schemes are simple, maybe three dominant colours, avoiding neon, fluorescent and similar harsh accent colours
• You won’t find geometry and symmetry on these covers because it looks hand-lettered and the art looks hand-drawn, possibly with collage effects, possibly looking like a linocut or woodblock print
• Flat design is also common.

To show you the sort of cover I’m talking about, let’s look at some Janice Hallett novels, which have been published with various covers.

The first of these covers is not at all what I’m talking about; the second two are:

The cover of Alperton Angels without the foiled look looks more in this style than the foiled version:

These two variations on The Twyford Code cover are exactly what I’m talking about:

FONT FAMILIES

Look for fonts which have a ‘stamp’ version in the family. Many of these fonts would look right at home on the cover of a children’s picture book.