Quote:
Originally Posted by wold
Initially I found these new PG covers ugly* as well. Digging into the background is however quite interesting.
Before getting to that: IMHO the PG implementation screwed up the font. Not to go into rant overdrive, but one of basic visual rules for me is *no font stretching*, especially horizontally. Things start to look off, amateurish, quickly. Sure, PG has long titles and subtitles, but this makes a border case edgy. Anyway.
The design came from some library people who researched automatic cover generation. The PG one uses the title letters, arranges them into a square. and converts them into PET ASCII symbols. So the gibberish is really the title, quite neat actually.
The PET symbols were found on the Commodore 64's keyboard. IIRC they were mostly used in quirky BASIC games. The ones I recall when a child were... dubious :P The colors are derived using some method. Indeed not with the best results, but hey 
They made a number of designs, shown on their blog page:
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2014/09/03...e-ebook-covers
At the bottom there's also a link to the Print 10 book/project.
I'm still considering added this cover generator to calibre with some tweaks, mostly to check out the code. Doubt it will be popular
* some prepend an f there. |
I found it pretty neat, too! But yeah, as gmw observed, complementary colors were not a wise choice. Especially in that early MS Paint color palette.
While trying to see what people were talking about (before I read down to your post), I also found this cover generator designed for Polish books. It's pretty intriguing, and much easier on the eyes:
http://variable.io/generative-covers/
Maybe someone at Project Gutenberg should get in touch with them.