Art Direction — 2024
Librivox Audiobook Covers
Free audiobooks deserve real art direction.
Opening
No brief. No deadline. No one asking for this.
Librivox is an open, free audiobook library. The covers were monotonous — the same template repeated across thousands of books, regardless of what the book was or what it deserved. That bothered me enough to do something about it.
The Only Rule
Every cover designed as if it were a real commission. Full art direction. Real visual thinking. Nothing templated.
The Arabian Nights (last volume). Before Egypt. Voyage Around the World. Converts from Infidelity. Sawdust & Spangles.
Five books. Five completely different answers. Because they're five completely different books.
The Question Behind All of It
What does this book feel like before you've read a word?
Not what it's about — that's what a synopsis is for. What's the emotional register? What's the texture of it? Is it vast or intimate? Ancient or alive? What colour is it, if it were a colour?
Those questions came before any visual decision. The covers are the answers.
What I Actually Think About It
Self-initiated work is the truest signal of what a designer actually cares about. There's no one to impress, no brief to hit, no approval to get. You either do it or you don't, and the reason you do it is because it matters to you.
The Librivox covers matter because the books inside them matter. Design that treats a free book as worthy of the same craft as a paid one is a small argument about what design is for. I'd rather make that argument than not make it.