“Don’t judge a book by its cover. Or do?”

All of us have come across the phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover” and many of us will say that it is true. People should not be judged by their appearance.

But what if this is not the figurative meaning of the phrase but we literally think about book reviews and evaluation.

We are all aware of the power of first impressions and how difficult it is to correct the bad ones. Yet the book cover gives us that first impression.

Before we read a book, it is the cover that must convince us to experience the book in all its glory.

Visual perception is quite subjective, but there are design norms and rules that give us a better idea of what should appeal to the general public.

The progress in the development of book covers coincided with the development of technology, and the invention of the printing press, which had a positive impact on literacy and reading comprehension, especially among the lower classes.

Books have become accessible to practically everyone.

In my thesis I present the psychological perception of visual art, i.e., the components of visual perception and their influence, and go through the history of book cover design.

I also present the importance of graphic design in literary art. In the empirical part I answer the questions and confirm or refuse the hypotheses.

As a research method, I used a questionnaire and handed it over to a wider group of readers, in order to capture more characteristics and people with different reading habits.

Through the questionnaire, I found out that most people give more importance to the content of a book than to its external appearance, but they have already given up reading a particular book because of its unconvincing cover.

In my thesis, I realized through research that the external image of a book has a huge influence on an individual’s selection of a certain book, and that is why it is important for us as future graphic designers to know how to create quality visual image that is interesting and appealing to people.

The choice of the topic of my thesis is a contribution to this.