Generative E-Book Covers ⇥ nypl.org

Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga, of the New York Public Library:

Given that [our] app’s visual quality is highly dependant on ebook cover quality (a wall of bad book covers makes the whole app look bad) we had to have a solution for displaying ebooks with no cover or a bad cover. The easy answer in this situation is doing what retail websites do for products with no associated image: display a generic image.

This is not a very elegant solution. When dealing with books, it seems lazy to have a “nothing to see here” image. We will have at least a title and an author to work with. The next obvious choice is to make a generic cover that incorporates the book’s title and author. This is also a common choice in software such as iBooks.

Skeuomorphism aside, it is a decent book cover. However, it feels a bit cheesy and I wanted something more in line with the rest of the design of the app (a design which I am leaving for a future post). We need a design that can display very long titles (up to 80 characters) but that would also look good with short ones (two or three characters); it should allow for one credited author, multiple authors or none at all.

This is really clever.