Why you should judge a book by its cover, according to a PNW designer

You know the phrase: Don't judge a book by its cover.

And yes, in modern parlance, it’s more about not judging people. Looks can be deceiving and all that jazz.

But many a well-meaning librarian or bookseller has encouraged readers not to judge literal books on their shelves by their covers.

I could not disagree more.

There are hundreds of thousands of books constantly competing for our attention. Old and new. Nonfiction and fiction. Classic and contemporary. And many of them are worth a read. So, I look to their covers to narrow down my ample options — even that doesn't make much of a dent in the long run, but it helps.

Elisha Zepeda is on my side about this. He's a book cover designer for Penguin Press; in other words, his job is get you to judge books by their covers and and grab the ones he designed. Take the quiz at the bottom of this story to see if you can spot which of his designs went to print.

"[Cover design is] world building," he told me on an episode of "Meet Me Here." "When I'm reading this book, I want to visualize these colors or, like, this saturation or this old film photo. It's giving you a baseline of what the world should be and the rest is up to you."

RELATED: Check out 'Meet Me Here,' KUOW's arts and culture podcast, here

Think about a cover that caught your eye recently. Why did it get your attention? What did you like about it? Was it a color? A shape? Were you intrigued? Grossed out? Inspired? Then, think about how many covers you walk by without ever noticing. There are so many out there that the design may not seem all that important.

"What if the book was lime green and it had comic sans?" Zepeda suggested. "Does that change your perception? Like, it doesn't matter until all of a sudden it does matter."

I first found Zepeda through his Instagram account where he shares videos of his design process. He might share a prompt like "design a book cover using seven photos" and show you how he combined those seven images into the final design. In that particular case, I was surprised to see the cover of "Transplants" by KUOW Book Club alum Daniel Tam-Claiborne.

"I'm usually getting a synopsis [of the book] from an editor or the publisher or my art director, and I try to see how far I can go with that," Zepeda explained. "It comes out much better if I don't overthink it, and that usually happens when I'm reading 10 chapters of a book and I get so overwhelmed with the imagery."

His speciality tends to be more abstract work, social sciences, and artistic designs. Those titles work well with his more free-flowing practice to create something that gets you, the prospective reader, to look twice.

But Zepeda, and other designers, don't just get to pick their favorite design and send it off to print. He's often asked to create multiple versions of a concept, and the powers that be decide which appears on the shelf. There is a lot of thought that goes into it: which designs are selling, which are overdone, what do the bestselling books have in common, are certain colors especially popular at the time?

The results are fascinating, whether they go to print or not. See for yourself! Take the quiz below to see if you can spot which covers Zepeda designed went to print.