\u201cWhy Are \u201cFeminist\u201d Book Cover Designs Still So Sexist?\u201d by Meaghan Barry<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meaghan Barry is an associate professor of graphic design at Oakland University. In September of 2020, Barry was named Crain\u2019s Detroit Business\u2019 2020 Notable Woman in Design. She co-founded Unsold Studio in 2013, which specializes in branding\u2014both 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<\/a>.) 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s books do a much better job at showing progress towards more inclusion and \u201cequity, intersectionality, and empowerment\u201d when compared to covers from adult novels. These covers for adults show the typical stereotypes of women\u2014some examples include signs of weakness, a white woman, being bossy, or just flat out being dead. Whereas children\u2019s books are featuring all different kinds of characters, and they appear in confident, self-assured poses. They also aren\u2019t as gendering in their use of colors, iconography, and typography. The colors consist of more earth tones or \u201cattention-grabbing\u201d, when flowers are used they aren\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s books: being bold, more inclusive, and confident. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Barry, Meaghan. \u201cWhy Are \u2018Feminist\u2019 Book Cover Designs Still So Sexist?\u201d\u00a0Eye on Design<\/em>, AIGA, 10 Dec. 2018, eyeondesign.aiga.org\/why-are-even-feminist-book-cover-designs-still-so-sexist\/.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWhy Are \u201cFeminist\u201d Book Cover Designs Still So Sexist?\u201d by Meaghan Barry Meaghan Barry is an associate professor of graphic design at Oakland University. In September of 2020, Barry was named Crain\u2019s Detroit Business\u2019 2020 Notable Woman in Design. She co-founded Unsold Studio in 2013, which specializes in branding\u2014both in consulting and strategy, as well as … Continue reading An Annotation on \u201cWhy Are \u201cFeminist\u201d Book Cover Designs Still So\u00a0Sexist?\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11016,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/nataliendesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/nataliendesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/nataliendesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/nataliendesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11016"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/nataliendesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/nataliendesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/nataliendesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/nataliendesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/nataliendesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/nataliendesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}