Sunday 10 July 2016

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Seeing Double - Covers that Look Remarkably Alike

Many of these kinds of posts have been done before. We all know about the similarites between Luna and Fate, Paper Towns and No Place to Fall, and Evermore and North of Beautiful. The same stock photo is used twice for four of these books, but I want to talk about books that look similar - not because of the same stock photo - that have been published more recently.

Working in a bookshop, this is just something you can't help but notice when you're shelving, accidentally confusing a book for another, but I was reminded of these books and inspired to write this post by Cait at Paper Fury, who mentioned in her June wrap up post that Girl Out of Water by Nat Luurtsema looked pretty similar to the old cover for Flirty Dancing by Jenny McLaughlin.

Girl Out of Water by Nat Luurtsema Flirty Dancing by Jenny McLaughlin

With bright coloured backgrounds, large fonts used for the titles, and only half a face shown at the bottom of the covers, these two are pretty similar.

Two that I confuse a lot are the UK cover for Faceless by Alyssa B. Sheinmel and the paperback of Firecracker by David Iserson.

Faceless by Alyssa B. Sheinmel Paperback of Firecracker by David Iserson

These two could be twins! Pale pink background, white title font, both titles start with "F", an illustration of a girl shown mostly only by her hair, no face with the background colour also being skin colour. I actually really like these covers, but they are just so similar!

And now If I Were You by Leslie Margolis and the UK cover for If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo.

If I Were You by Leslie Margolis If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo

Although If I Were You was published in the US last year, we only got it in stock at work in May, not too long before If I Was Your Girl was published. When If I Were You came in, I saw it first upside down, and squealed with excitement, thinking it was If I Was Your Girl. They both have a very similar colour scheme, illustrated with shapes, and have similar titles. They don't look exactly alike, but they're similar enough to cause confusion at first glance.

So what do you think of these covers? Do you mind when covers are similar, or is it too confusing? Have you seen any other recent covers that look similar?

I'm thinking of making this into an irregular feature for any other covers I spot - let me know if you'd like to see more!

2 comments:

  1. Omg I'm glad I'm not alone in the thinking that Girl Out of Water and Flirty Dancing are too alike. xD When I got GOOW in the mail I was like "But wait haven't I already read this?" 😂 SO YEAH. Too similar. But omgggg Faceless and Firecracker!?!? LIKE THEY EVEN HAVE SIMILAR SOUNDING TITLES. I think designers need to maybe talk to each other more hahaha.

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    1. Right?! Faceless and Firecracker are just far too similar! I think it's a different publisher thing. Some designers are freelance, but publishers also have their own designers, and Firecracker is a US book, while the cover for Faceless is the UK cover. Would be a little difficult for all designers to ask if anyone's done a similar cover before, haha!

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