“Why Are “Feminist” Book Cover Designs Still So Sexist?” by Meaghan Barry
Meaghan Barry is an associate professor of graphic design at Oakland University. In September of 2020, Barry was named Crain’s Detroit Business’ 2020 Notable Woman in Design. She co-founded Unsold Studio in 2013, which specializes in branding—both in consulting and strategy, as well as the actual design work. She has won a variety of awards, given many presentations, and has been in a number of exhibitions (check out the full list here.) With her high involvement in the design world, both in education and in the actual process of designing, I trust what she has to say and her analysis on aspects in design.
Barry starts off by pointing out a great fact: in 2010 many feminist novels were bestsellers, but their covers hardly ever won awards for best in design. This article then talks about how the covers of children’s books do a much better job at showing progress towards more inclusion and “equity, intersectionality, and empowerment” when compared to covers from adult novels. These covers for adults show the typical stereotypes of women—some examples include signs of weakness, a white woman, being bossy, or just flat out being dead. Whereas children’s books are featuring all different kinds of characters, and they appear in confident, self-assured poses. They also aren’t as gendering in their use of colors, iconography, and typography. The colors consist of more earth tones or “attention-grabbing”, when flowers are used they aren’t delicate flowers but instead ones that are bolder, and typography styles are bolder too in their weight, even if a calligraphy style is used. Barry goes on to describe how adult domestic noir novels utilize silhouettes, as if trying to depict the woman could be you, the reader, but still they too strongly resemble white women. In feminist dystopian novels, there’s a lot of focus on the body and the color red, which represents weakness likes passion, power, and blood to cisgender women, in covers. When it comes to nonfiction titles, Barry notices these covers are more bold and masculine in their approach, but still they use serif typefaces to have a softer tone because it appears more strictly academic. In the end, Barry states we need to start seeing more cover designs follow after those of children’s books: being bold, more inclusive, and confident.
Barry, Meaghan. “Why Are ‘Feminist’ Book Cover Designs Still So Sexist?” Eye on Design, AIGA, 10 Dec. 2018, eyeondesign.aiga.org/why-are-even-feminist-book-cover-designs-still-so-sexist/.
