Maybe it's a pensive shot of Matthew Maconnhey or insert other actor looking dramatically into the
distance, a bold gaze of empowerment. Or it's a garish orange slapped with all caps. There is one
thing that these books are designed to make you believe and that's that they can change your life.
Hi its Divya g what does the g stand for? The g stands for getting too hot. How do they do it? How
do these books convince you that drinking water is the cure to depression? In the beginning there was
a word and the word was self-help books and i read a ton of them and i thought okay let's look at
that. Let's look at some of the trends out there so that i can help you design your own version.
Disclaimer this video is not that serious and whatever i say is never that deep! So self-help
very broad category you have spiritual, you have habit and lifestyle, you have mental health,
and each of these have their own trends and subtrends And before we come to the design i just
wanted to share with you a few that i personally found interesting. This author just learned how
to swear. Main characteristics is a bright and a plain background and a massive san serif font that
just screams. Plagued by the book blob. There is another pandemic in the publishing industry
and there is no immunity! Brights blubbish designs we love to see them because we we have no choice.
This is something that i've covered previously. I call these self-help books that are designed
specifically for e-commerce it's designed to be flourished on instagram, it's designed to be on
TikTok. Written in 2001: note may not actually be written in 2001. So these are the covers for
those serious topics and yes they look like they were created in the days of
windows xp. And yeah it's something that probably your university lecturer is going
to prescribe to you because they're going to say you need it for this course and yeah probably
they wrote it themselves and then you find out you know what? You're actually gonna torrent it. Why?
Because you find out that it's 75.99 who's going to have that much money when you're a student?
Beige. Just beige. Just title. Why use imagery at all when you can let the title speak for itself?
My personal favorite: symbollic. Like so a lot of cover design in general has a lot of
symbolism there is no better place to use it than for self-help non-fiction and the likes
just to jazz it up a little bit. You could do it very safe and normal but i personally like
the ones that are very- but i personally like it when designers add a little bit of intrigue or
humor. This is "the art of noticing" yeah it's pretty simple, but i think it's effective. I
haven't seen this physically but it looks like they've debossed the titles you can kind of
barely see it but you notice the pop of blue. I asked you guys on
instagram follow me and the youtube community subscribe to me for some self-help book title
suggestions right and here's just a few of the golden nuggets. The [ __ ] of [ __ ]. Pinocchio's
peril: 573 easy steps to pretending that you're a real boy. How to become an ape again the science
of devolution. I challenge you guys to give me some of your best self-help book titles.
That's all right let's get designing. Beige. now i haven't made a cover video in a hot taste bud
numbing roof of my mouth burning minute. Part of it is my issue with technology now this is
an in real time version of just what happens every time i try to open photoshop. And part
of it is just the demands of my masters projects I'm doing so i'm simultaneously having to complete
six or seven projects in the next two months one of them including is my fat dissertation. I know
everyone and their mom has read atomic habits here and its message is really just you know to
build good habits you have to start small, but when your whole existence is just bad habits
leading to late nights ending alone it really feels overwhelming when your deadlines are just
feeling like 2007 superhero film based on the animated television series ben 10
a race against time. Part of it is like this fear of like who cares?! I need to make new content
but i'm struggling with time space capacity my mental state everything! Because every time i go
and google (youtube) analytics tells me like oh your video sucks dude 10 out of 10 and not in a
good way. Like here for example i was staring at screen for so long nothing was coming and
then i said you know what it's time to go back to tradition so then i booked a flight to Nepal to
run away and dry spices in the sun. To be honest creativity is something that i've really struggled
with like my entire life but reading through these self-help books I thought you know what?
Who's writing this? Joanne the scammer? The power of misleading titles you wanna showcase
it's grandiosity with a serif font and to really make sure that you read this thing you know it's
gonna change my life add some flex add credibility you know put all your titles in md psyd phd m a m
phil mastering science mastering technology master of the universe this is preposterous. And and and
you always want to add a little bit of photography that really encapsulates the book and that's how
you get people to buy your books so you can tell them things that they already know. Unless you're
doing something a bit more absurd or maximalist i say don't use more than maximum three fonts two
or one is probably better just to make it look a little bit more proffesh. You can also use
a template just to make sure that you're not going over the margins or anything. Buy my [ __ ] book!
I think this is the easiest one. It's chunky, it's bold, it's brave, it's beautiful. It's a blocky
text against a very vibrant background color and it's basically it. Here i've left aligned it um
basically to remind you of another book *coughs*. I call this one the art of bullshite - a guide on
blagging your way through life because in my personal experience my early 20s have been
exact that. You know when the imposter syndrome is high and you really have to shut down the inner
critic in your voice with the little twirly mustache and rubbing his hands like this. And
a little nice touch is to put permanent printed awards on the cover that the user cannot remove
especially if it's advertising real estate. Take a cover trend and just use it? That's a really bad
title i need to fix that one. I am a hoe for mixed textures, collage type shit and i think layering
is pretty trendy in the cover design sphere right now and i wanted to play around a little bit with
my own version. Now you can do this with card physically but i wanted to do in photoshop just
use like shadows and like some paper textures to kind of simulate it just because i found it easier
and the idea that i was trying to get across for this one is like this person is someone who's
struggling, someone who looks towards self-help books, gurus, youtube videos and feels lost
(myself). So i wanted to get a silhouette of a very generic person put them upside down and have
lots of layers behind them to really symbolize you know what they're overthinking they're in
their head a little bit too much. My little title i still wanted that kind of cut out of paper feel
to it. "Self-help didn't help". Playing around with the positioning i think the idea was like
i wanted to be like like tetris - like they're all stacked up against each other and they're
kind of falling all over the place. Having some sort of white space or empty space around can be
quite good but for some reason when i looked and i was like it just didn't feel right to me so to
add some distress to poor.. i don't know... Ramesh here um. I added like a torn paper texture in the
background. When the self help no help self. Now it's not that i think that self-help books aren't
useful but you can't just read a self-help book and expect it to magically cure you... Divya. I
use blue because i thought it'd be fitting for the whole sadness vibe and i wanted titles to pop so i
use orange because it's a contrasting color gotta add that new york times bestseller. Okay so i'm
not trying to get this published or anything but looking back here i'm looking at this cover and
i think there's so many issues i genuinely don't like the way that this came out i don't know much
about typography so the title spacing was a bit weird for me i don't know if it's like the color
scheme i don't like, the way i don't know maybe the outline of the subtitles, or even the author
name? The way the shadows look or the subtitle but i told myself: Divya don't put the d in deeping it
too much. I was like you're deeping it. Relax. All right. Divya you just need to make something
god damn. F is not for failure, f is for fun! So these are the covers. What genre should we tackle
next? Thank you so much for being patient with my channel and me share your creativity with me
or maybe have some influence on my next video on my twitter and instagram follow me for more books
design and bookish design and sometimes also like social commentary content. Stay out of the sun,
curse the wind and blame the government. It's very hot and if you guys want to
hug goodbye or anything it's here's your chance
sweaty hug run away you've still got time i'm i'm like a freaking monster
matthew mcconaughey
look what we've done to the world what have we done
suffering heat despair heart damn shame you know who i am of matthew mcconaughey