I grew up in Chicago, but I was born in Minneapolis, and as a child, I frequented a bookstore called Magers & Quinn. What always intrigued me was its used books section, which lacked an identifiable organization system. Whatever order existed was a product of accumulation: a donation, a death, a box that arrived Tuesday and got shelved fastest-to-hand. Rather than making the store feel useless, the chaos made it feel more alive.
During a recent trip to Minneapolis to visit family, I returned to the bookstore, and immediately upon entering the used books section, there was a book that caught my eye. Its cover depicted a colossal human figure rising like a mythic monument, with his body breaking open into a dark, surreal city of machinery, buildings, and shadows. It was rendered in a painterly science-fiction style in part pulp illustration, part symbolic collage. Above it all, stark, condensed lettering revealed its title.
Gregory Manchess’s original cover for Stories of Your Life and Others, disliked by Ted Chiang but appreciated by me.
Stories of Your Life and Others is a collection of short stories by Ted Chiang. It’s been highly praised and awarded in the world of science fiction, so it’s pretty well-known, but when I picked it up at the bookstore, didn’t know of its existence. The cover piqued my curiosity, so after reading the summary, I bought it immediately, and it quickly became one of my favorite works of fiction.
What I did in that bookstore is what I do for every bookstore, product launch, and landing page that makes its way into my life: I read the covers and use them to judge the content and authors that they represent. And I don’t think this is as shallow as the age-old proverb suggests.
Packaging precedes the product
Conventional wisdom reduces judging a book by its cover to a failure of attention or a display of superficiality. They’ll argue that it’s a shortcut around the “real thing”. The “sophisticated” position is to look past the surface towards the substance. They’ll implore you to avoid being fooled by packaging.
I’d argue for a different reading.
Just as a surface isn’t something that’s cleanly separable from its interior, a cover isn’t just a decoration to ornament the treasure within. In fact, it’s the first form by which a thing presents itself to a viewer, in a sacred first act of communication between a maker and a reader before they make the decision to turn a page. We shouldn’t perceive aesthetics as something added after the real work is done; they are how the real work first becomes perceivable at all.
Someone had interpreted Chiang’s stories as encounters with ideas so vast that they could barely remain contained within the human form. The monumental figure, splitting open into machinery, architecture, and shadow, suggested that the book would treat consciousness itself as a structure to be entered, dismantled, and rebuilt. Before I knew anything about Ted Chiang or his writings, the cover had already made its first argument: these were stories in which the intimate and the cosmic, the human and the technological, would collapse into one another. The book’s first argument about what it is was shown in its cover.
This is true for all designed surfaces. The landing page for a product, the brand identity for a company, and the flyer for an event all serve as their covers. A website, in the fullest sense, is a book cover with doors - a first impression you can actually walk into.
A surface’s design isn’t limited to its aesthetics; it also encompasses its feeling. There’s a reason why Apple has invested a great amount of time, money, and effort into designing a perfect unboxing experience for all of its products.
Design is a handshake
I think of design as the handshake before a conversation.
A handshake can be warm or cold, confident or anxious, generous or transactional. It doesn’t tell you everything about the conversation, person, or relationship behind it, but it gives you a reading. You decide, immediately and mostly unconsciously, how to proceed. Bad handshakes don’t end conversations, but they add discordance. Similarly, good ones make no guarantees, but they make the next steps easier.
This is what good design does. A restaurant with a beautifully typeset menu where the margins are right and the font doesn’t fight itself doesn’t always mark delicious food, but it suggests that someone at the establishment is paying attention to detail, and there’s definitely a correlation.
What I find interesting about web, product, and brand design specifically is that you’re designing a cover that people will re-enter hundreds of times, which means the handshake becomes a ritual. Considerations including the mood of a brand, the weight of a button, and the spacing of a headline collectively shape how people feel about spending time within a brand’s world.
These arrive before our analytical minds can catch up. We are pattern-recognition machines who’ve accumulated years of emotional residue, and the first patterns that we read are visual. Getting the handshake right, however, depends on its context. This is the part I want to be careful about.
There’s a snobbish version of caring about aesthetics wherein everything becomes a purity contest. Where every typeface must be Helvetica and there must be substantial white space, and anything loud or unusual or maximalist is seen as guilty of bad taste.
That is not what I mean.
A messy punk flyer with cut-up letters, xerox texture, and an accidentally compositional smear can be great design, not in spite of the mess but rather because of it. The mess is alive, purposeful, and exactly calibrated to what the artifact is trying to convey. A pulp sci-fi cover with dubious physics can make a book feel like contraband from another universe, and for a certain novel, that feeling can be exactly right.
Raymond Pettibon, Black Flag at the Mabuhay (1981)Flyer for the musical group "Bad Brains"Cover art for the first edition of Larry Niven's Ringworld, illustrated by Dean Ellis (1970)Cover art for the first edition of Ubik by Philip K. Dick by Peter Rauch (1969).
Indifference means bad design
For me, a particular visual style isn’t a requirement, but intentionality is.
The opposite of intentional design isn’t ugly design - it’s indifferent design. Vibe-coded websites are a great example. I don’t have anything against designers who use AI to speed up their web development process (I really can’t, as I do the same), but it does bother me when I see them default to design decisions that the models decided for them. This used to mean an overuse of purple gradients, lazily laid out icons, and text-heavy cards. Now, it’s more visible in the form of overused cream-colored backgrounds, extraneous dividing lines, and the unintentional use of serifs for emphasis.
What vibe-coded websites look like by default as of the time of writing
They feel careless, and it’s not because they violate some aesthetic code. The problem is that they give you no signal about what they represent or the values of the people behind them. Instead of first properly setting the temperature, they expect you to read what they’re selling before they’ve actually earned your attention.
Even design decisions that seem “dumb” at first glance can become genuinely great if there’s intentionality behind them. I have a distinct memory of being in a convenience store with some friends back in high school and seeing a row of cans with a tattoo art style, prominent skull visuals, and gothic typography reading “Liquid Death”. At the time, I remarked to one of my friends that I thought it was “dumb” to name a water brand “Liquid Death”, but he argued that it was actually clever, because that very dissonance was what made it grab your attention and talk about it with your friends.
The original Liquid Death can and packaging design is a masterstroke in branding
That reaction was central to the brand’s strategy. Founder Mike Cessario has described his creative process as asking, “What’s the dumbest idea you can think of?” He isn’t endorsing randomness, but rather arguing in favor of ideas that conventional corporate judgment would reject before they could become interesting. This is a fascinating example because the fundamental sameness of water products makes their branding paramount. Calling water “Liquid Death,” packaging it like beer, and decorating it with a melting skull and the words “Murder Your Thirst” all appear wrong by the conventions of bottled water, which usually rely on glaciers, blue gradients, and promises of purity, but the wrongness is the point.
Aesthetics, at their best, are evidence of attention. The surface communicates that someone cared enough about something to make it work and arrive in style.
Why we should judge books by their covers
The version of “don’t judge a book by its cover” that I’d defend is narrower than the proverb. Don’t just judge a book by its cover and stop there. Use the cover as the first clue, but not the final verdict.
Aesthetics invite you to explore the depth behind them. They’re the scent of the kitchen before the meal, the opening chord before the song, and the lobby you enter before finding your room. When those things are right, you feel welcomed. When they’re careless, confusing, or incoherent, you hesitate, even if you can’t fully explain why.
I care about design because I care about how things enter then become a part of people’s lives. The entry moment is a brand, product, or work’s first act of communication, and these matter more than we care to admit. They shape what people expect, what they believe, and whether they give the rest of the thing a real chance.
And first impressions compound. Not because they trap you (you can absolutely revise them), but because they shape the interpretive frame you bring to everything that follows.
This is why I’ve never managed to stop judging covers, because I know that the surface is where everything starts and proves whether someone was paying attention.
And I have never regretted stopping to judge.
Appendix
Books
Batman #227 - such a great composition that masterfully sets the story’s gothic atmosphere. This is actually an homage to Detective Comics #31 from the Golden Age, but more refined and detailed. I particularly like the faded look of Batman’s figure in the background as an aesthetic choice.
Films
Akira - Striking use of figure/ground and perspective. A bombastic color palette and the capture of an anticipatory moment add a feeling of action and excitement.
Series
True Detective - Probably my favorite opening sequence out of this bunch. The double exposures merge the characters with Louisiana’s industrial landscape, suggesting the inseparability of people and place against the series’ backdrop of buried history and moral decay.
Mad Men - A falling corporate executive is towered over by flashy advertisements, contrasting the seductive surface of consumer culture and the instability that lies beneath it (and the people behind it).
The Sopranos - The least flashy of the bunch, which evokes the counter-intuitive banality of the 90s / early 2000s New Jersey mob life and paints a portrait of identity, power, and unease.
Dark - Mirrored imagery paired with a haunting score fractures cinematography into unsettling patterns, reflecting the cyclical nature of time and sense of interconnectedness highlighted in the series
The Twilight Zone - Floating objects, disembodied imagery, and eerie sounds transform that which is familiar into something strange and surreal, mentally preparing the viewer to enter a world governed by uncertainty and imagination.
Invincible - Beyond its humorous timing, the title card’s accumulating damage tracks the series’ escalating violence and turns a repeated graphic into a visual record of consequence.
Two-Face - One of the show’s strongest title cards. The split lighting, suspended coin, and two-toned figure reduce the villain's tragedy into a beautifully simple image.
Illustrative Comparisons
I hate this - the novel’s title is overshadowed by that of the film adaptation and the composition as a whole just reads as lazy. Also, the loud illustration hasn’t aged well.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is one of my favorite artworks, but I don’t find that it’s the best piece to capture the plot or themes of the novel and the design choices are otherwise lazy.
I’m a big fan of Brian Selznick’s work and art style, but his cover art for the series leave something to be desired for me, as the illustrations feel noisy and don’t tell me anything meaningful about the books visually.
Boring. The Möbius strip could have been employed more interestingly and effectively, but instead it’s part of a distasteful image that looks like a stock photograph. The layout as a whole is also lazy and optically unsatisfying.
I love this one. Very distinct color choices, good use of contrast in the type, and effective in eliciting a sense of and mythic grandeur.
I despise everything about this. Ugly color palette, distasteful typography, and noisy graphic elements. Worst of all, I feel like it doesn’t portray the spirit of the novel at all.
These are so well-done and make me nostalgic for a time when these films embraced their roots. These posters set the atmosphere for the film very well and are great photographic compositions in general. They also seem more in line with the much darker, grounded take on the symbiote story that director Sam Raimi envisioned that was scrapped because of studio mandates.
This is how you do an ensemble poster. It’s crowded, but the painted composition still feels coherent and purposeful, with a clear hierarchy, strong sense of movement, and enough visual drama to make the film feel legendary.
My least favorite out of these. The tangled linework is arbitrary and the blocked-out title feels frustrating instead of clever. I also find the distressed yellow-and-black palette nauseating and abrasive.
