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kottke.org posts about R.E. Hawley

The Book Blob

a number of book covers with amorphous color blobs that look similar

Over at Print, R.E. Hawley writes about a book cover design trend you may have noticed: Behold, the Book Blob.

This design trend, well into its third or fourth year in the major publishing houses, has attracted plenty of nicknames and attendant discourse online โ€” culture critic Jeva Lange calls it “blobs of suggestive colors,” while writer Alana Pockros calls it the “unicorn frappuccino cover,” and New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka once referred to it on Twitter as “the Zombie Formalism of book covers.”

I hadn’t really noticed this, but only because I thought these were all mostly the same book. Eep.