The New Trend In Book Covers Is Old-Timey Animals | Defector

If you perused a bookstore's new fiction section anytime between 2019 and 2023, you probably saw a bunch of books festooned by indistinct, pastely swatches of color. A bunch of smart, incisive things have been written about the color blob trend over the course of its moment as the book cover trend du too many jours, and the template was so ubiquitously adhered to that you didn't even have to have read You Exist Too Much or The Vanishing Half to have understood its deal. Book cover design, like any other field of design, moves in waves. While the color blob was preceded by the two-dimensional color block meta and the headless woman fad, there are some particularities to note. Blobwave's rise was contemporaneous with that of algorithmic book-buying, both on Amazon and on social media, and as Print noted three years ago, color blob design represented a "'safe' route disproportionately taken in service of women of color and debut authors."

But this is not a story about the blob. This is about what comes next, a question to which I propose the following answer: old-timey animals.