The above photo comes from the cover of Freakonomics, a bestselling book that I very much enjoyed (although I’m not an economics major or anything, and I hear criticisms. Anyone care to share?).

I get the feeling that other books are trying to ride Freakonomicseses ‘ coattails by subtly making every single book that comes out mimic the layout of the Freakonomics cover. Does the strategy subconsciously work? I don’t know, but I bought a few of them.

Come, take a walk with me…

Here’s Freakonomics in all it’s glory. The background is not part of the book cover, I just needed a buffer zone because not every book is going to fit neatly into the image template. I know EVERYBODY feels me on that one.

Anyways, you can see the key: BIG title at the top. Roundish food object in the middle. BIG authors at the bottom. Also, lots of white space. It’s visually appealing, I get why it’s used. It’s clean, open, focused. Very nice. Everybody should do it. And did it they did. I know some of these aren’t quite exact but hey! Shut up. This is the internet. It doesn’t need to be accurate. I still don’t know why the middle object ALWAYS has to be food though, especially when hardly any of these books are ABOUT food.

This next one has 2 strikes in one title. One is yellow, but both involve pie for some reason:

Some may argue that Starfish aren’t food. But you obviously haven’t met any Asians, or haven’t made giant leaps of assumptions about what they eat based on movies you’ve seen.

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