Books which often have the target audience of women tend to follow a particular style and visual codes to fit into romance and other fictional genres. I visited Waterstones, WH SMITH and stores such as Tesco & Sainsburys to view their collections of books on the shelf.
A large majority of the books directed at women as their audience are often similar to the photograph of a shelf above. Many of the books contain shades of pink, this colour holds dominant ideals of femininity and delicateness within society and therefore is a safe option for designers to use on a cover for a romantic book for example.
One of the covers within this image is Kate's Wedding seen below:
What is apparent about this design is that it does follow along with the typical codes I have seen from viewing various book shops. Books for women seem to be incredibly feminine which starts from a pink/ red colour palette which are colours associated with love/romance. The font is a script which is based from handwriting and therefore seen as personal which relates to the storyline. The use of a script font also further pushes the idea of femininity as it contains thick and thin line weights which produce curves, the choice of font is important as a heavy sans serif such as Helvetica would give the book a completely different aesthetic.
However with the introduction of an ever increasing number of feminist powerful female writers there are some book covers which are different and stand out on the shelf. This difference is important to note for my own interpretation of How To Be A Woman- Caitlin Moran doesn't blend into the crowd she is incredibly full of personality and opinions and the book cover should somehow reflect this.
A few examples of covers I have seen which contain these elements is GirlBoss:
In comparison to the previous design above the typographical and design elements of this cover are completely different and consequently produces a design which portrays a different attitude. The previous design used pink delicate curved script type whereas this design uses a black block capital sans serif font which signifies a strong and substantial font and also woman too which is enhanced by the pose within the photograph. The difference between these feminist driven books and those simply just sold to women is that they have a history, story and agenda of opinion which is stimulated by the previous research I did into feminism and art such as the guerrilla girls.
Again much like the previous design as a feminist book the design breaks certain rules of femininity by using a large sans serif font which implies impact and a bold nature. Both this design and GIRLBOSS still use pink, so they do not completely reject femininity but use pink as a strong colour to somehow prove that you can be pink and feminine but also strong. The penguin redesign of How To Be A Woman definitely contains these ideas as the book discusses how different women are, the idea is that not every woman is the same but each can be celebrated, perhaps this means that the design should include different fonts/ colours to signify this or perhaps a contrast.
