What Do You Like in a Cookbook Cover Design?

 Last week I watched a Substack livestream on cookbook cover design, featuring Jenna Helwig (founder of the Substack Cookbookery Collective, cookbook and mystery author, food editor at Real Simple, and daughter of my book group friend Linda) and Frances Abrantes Baca (book designer). They were focused on new cookbooks released this summer. It was a fun conversation that inspired me to look through my cookbooks (I probably have around 80), pick out some favorites, and think about what features I tend to like. I like to think I'm not overly influenced by covers, but I'm guessing the influence might be greater than I think. 

Anyway, here's what I discovered. I like blue covers (like Jenna and as I do with other genres of books). I have quite a few books with red covers and few with yellow/gold covers. Don't know if that reflects bias in my buying or perhaps trends at different times when I was buying cookbooks.  Couple examples:

  

  

I also really liked this high-contrast cover (that also aligns with my preferences in other genres) and didn't pick any lighter colored covers among my favorites: 

I also like covers with a "homey" feel like these: 

  

In general, I'm not a huge fan of having the author pictured standing behind some food (especially if they are "social media" chefs or strictly TV chefs), but the "just back from the farmer's market" feeling of the Ruth Reichl cover and the connection to the title of the book (which is a memoir/cookbook) made this work for me. 

I also like big pictures, not little pictures with a lot of text or little pictures in the four corners of the cover or no pictures at all. I like photographs a bit more than illustrations, but some illustrations work too. And, of course, the food should be colorful--brown food may taste good, but it's not so photogenic. I also like an out-of-focus background, as seen in these two covers, rather than the plate of food being knocked out with no background (BTW: the salad on the cover of Colorado Colore is one I've made many times--delicious!):

   

As professionals, Jenna and Frances were a lot more attuned to type font than I am--as long as I can read the title, I'm okay even if the type is a bit much, as with the nonword Colore above. Something that both of them mentioned liking is when there's a hand shown, suggesting the hand of the person creating the food. I think that might be a recent trend because I don't have a single book depicting a hand. 

I found this a fun exercise--and the next cookbook I buy, I'm going to try to make sure I'm not overly influenced by my cover preferences. 

What do you like in a cookbook cover?