The current cover of If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies is kind of ugly and I hope it is just a placeholder. At least one of my friends agrees. Book covers matter a lot!
I’m not a book cover designer, but here are some thoughts:
AI is popular right now, so you’d probably want to indicate that from a distance. The current cover has “AI” half-faded in the tagline.
Generally the cover is not very nice to look at.
Why are you de-emphasizing “Kill Us All” by hiding it behind that red glow?
I do like the font choice, though. No-nonsense and straightforward.
I work as a designer (but not a cover designer) and I agree. This should be redesigned.
Straight black and white text isn’t a great choice here, and makes me think of science-fiction and amateur publications rather than a a serious book about technology, philosophy and consequences. For books with covers which have done well in this space, take a look at the waterstones best sellers for science and tech.
Yeah. It is probably even more important for the cover to look serious and “academically respectable” than for it to look maximally appealing to a broad audience. It shouldn’t give the impression of a science fiction novel or a sensationalist crackpot theory. An even more negative example of this kind (in my opinion) is the American cover of The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.
I actually find the font a bit hard to read: my System 1 brain took a noticeable split second (I’d estimate about 0.8 seconds) longer to process the words’ semantic meanings than it does with normal, all-lowercase text, or even with the titles of the other book covers at the Amazon link. This took long enough that I could see myself (i.e. my System 1) glossing over this book entirely when scrolling/looking through a page of books, being drawn to more immediately legible items.
Although the above might just be a quirk of my personal attention/processing style, I wonder if it’s worth experimenting with changes in font given this. I’d suspect my experience occurred due in part to the heavy font weight, since the title’s characters look less immediately distinguishable (and more blobby) than with lower weights. There are also a few very narrow spaces between adjacent words that probably complicate immediate word distinguishing. As mentioned above, the topic of AI also isn’t immediately clear within the title, which I’d worry might lose domain-interested readers if not understood semantically.
Run it a few times in different image generators, and I liked this one actually. It’s the same kind of palette but with “photo” of a sunset sky on the background and thinner font. Might be a good starting point as a prototype.
The prompt was: “The ominous cover of “If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies” book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. On black background, grey clouds, illuminated by red light from the ground which is not visible.”
This one is extremely good. I already made one with simple black/red gradients but I like this one much more. I can mix mine and yours together to create a grammatically correct one
The current cover of If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies is kind of ugly and I hope it is just a placeholder. At least one of my friends agrees. Book covers matter a lot!
I’m not a book cover designer, but here are some thoughts:
AI is popular right now, so you’d probably want to indicate that from a distance. The current cover has “AI” half-faded in the tagline.
Generally the cover is not very nice to look at.
Why are you de-emphasizing “Kill Us All” by hiding it behind that red glow?
I do like the font choice, though. No-nonsense and straightforward.
@Eliezer Yudkowsky @So8res
I work as a designer (but not a cover designer) and I agree. This should be redesigned.
Straight black and white text isn’t a great choice here, and makes me think of science-fiction and amateur publications rather than a a serious book about technology, philosophy and consequences. For books with covers which have done well in this space, take a look at the waterstones best sellers for science and tech.
Yeah. It is probably even more important for the cover to look serious and “academically respectable” than for it to look maximally appealing to a broad audience. It shouldn’t give the impression of a science fiction novel or a sensationalist crackpot theory. An even more negative example of this kind (in my opinion) is the American cover of The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.
My version:
Probably too understated, but it’s the sort of thing I like.
GoogleDraw link if anyone wants to copy and modify: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/10nB-1GC_LWAZRhvFBJnAAzhTNJueDCtwHXprVUZChB0/edit
It looks like ass. Literally.
Extremely quickly thrown together concept.
If-Anyone.png
Not sure about the italics, but I like showing Earth this way from space. It drives home a sense of scale.
Here are a couple of suggestions:
https://imgur.com/X5yyp9N
https://imgur.com/kxn99Uj
https://imgur.com/UCm4n0W
https://imgur.com/GXQLuOS
I also took my stab at this idea. Here is my cover. The left empty part is for the back.
I think that nate soares and yudkowsky aren’t really well known names so the cover should do some name dropping (current one doesn’t do it)
it is truly terrible
I actually find the font a bit hard to read: my System 1 brain took a noticeable split second (I’d estimate about 0.8 seconds) longer to process the words’ semantic meanings than it does with normal, all-lowercase text, or even with the titles of the other book covers at the Amazon link. This took long enough that I could see myself (i.e. my System 1) glossing over this book entirely when scrolling/looking through a page of books, being drawn to more immediately legible items.
Although the above might just be a quirk of my personal attention/processing style, I wonder if it’s worth experimenting with changes in font given this. I’d suspect my experience occurred due in part to the heavy font weight, since the title’s characters look less immediately distinguishable (and more blobby) than with lower weights. There are also a few very narrow spaces between adjacent words that probably complicate immediate word distinguishing. As mentioned above, the topic of AI also isn’t immediately clear within the title, which I’d worry might lose domain-interested readers if not understood semantically.
Run it a few times in different image generators, and I liked this one actually. It’s the same kind of palette but with “photo” of a sunset sky on the background and thinner font. Might be a good starting point as a prototype.
Link to the image. It just looks better if you squint a bit link.
The prompt was: “The ominous cover of “If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies” book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. On black background, grey clouds, illuminated by red light from the ground which is not visible.”
This one is extremely good. I already made one with simple black/red gradients but I like this one much more. I can mix mine and yours together to create a grammatically correct one
Do it!
If you go to Amazon most of the books in that section look similar
I’d say that Empire of AI, AI Snake Oil, and The Age of AI are good book covers, and that Genesis and More Everything Forever are bad covers.