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Originally Posted by kennyc
Interesting stuff here. I don't think there's any harm (certainly not a cardinal sin) of showing the characters on the cover, provided they match the descriptions. 
Like the Slite, the real purpose of the cover is to make it stand out on the shelf, to get the shopper to pick it up - same is true if browsing on-line. There are a number of ways to do this graphically and all ways don't work for all people. |
That's a marketers perspective, not that of anybody who actually cares about design. And if it were true, then why are so many book covers alike? why are so many covers bland? Even if what you said were true (which it is not and hasn't been for a long time) the internet is not a bookstore, we're playing by different rules now. Some of those rules we're making up as we go along, which is all the more exciting.
If the object is to just produce some generic crap, then I don't want part of it. There's tons of places on the web where a cover designer can slap you a font on top of some stock art and charge you $100 for the privilege. Screw it, why not just put some fonts on top of a starfield like every other bloody sci-fi book that's ever been published.
The cardinal sin is one of second-guessing the imagination of the reader. Pre-loading an expectation of the characters within the text (always a wrong thing to do). If you want a comic book, then buy a comic book. That's full of pretty pictures to look at and you don't have to stretch your imagination any to imagine what they look like.
Hopefully this is not the place for that kind of thing.