End Of The Year Eye Candy: Still More of the Best Book Covers of 2025

I’ll be honest. This is a good cover design, but it is not my favorite of the options that were possible for this book. Sullivan shared the ones that landed on the cutting room floor on Instagram and they’re worth a gander.

That said, there is a lot to like on this. The font type is pretty standard stuff, but the placement of “The Unauthorized History” adds some pizazz. Truly it’s the bright pink cover and the use of space for the carton of doll legs that give this cover a placement on this list. Big bonus points for an array of Barbie skin colors for those disembodied legs.

Purple and green kind of clash, but they marry well in Corral’s cover design. There’s a lightness and a heaviness with the colors, as well as the lines throughout the image, and everything strikes a nice balance. The shaky font feels right in contrast to the tall–but smooth–waves. The hand holding the ship like a marionnette is clever as well.

Look at this cover and the previous for Futility together. For being very different covers and designs, they have an odd sort of harmony with one another, don’t they?

Helm is a mischievous wind and one that’s earned itself a place in long time legends and folklore. It makes sense that the cover would feature a big wind, with a title font that looks windswept.

Anchoring this cover, though, is the woman in the bottom left corner. Yes, she’s being blown by the wind, hair and umbrella and skirt all messy. Yet her stance is one of confidence, not fear–she’s staring down the helm with as much force as she can.

This US cover is so much more interesting than the Very Literary cover in the UK.

Not only is that title amazing, the cover matches it nicely. There’s nothing secret here: it’s a person who delivers parcels out doing their thing. Corral and Kremmerz bring energy in their color choices and in the way they focus on the image instead of the font–we’re still in an era where font drives so many designs.

The other thing that really makes this cover magic is what might be most unexpected for US readers: this is a work of nonfiction. Rarely does adult nonfiction or memoir see an illustrated cover outside of comics. This bucks so many conventions and does it well.

It’s creepy.

Then you look closer.

It gets creepier.

The color choices, the tangly roots, the skull, and the church? A+ horror cover art.

Though font-driven cover design has been THE story of cover design over the last decade or more, it can still be done in really evocative ways. This is one such example. There are so many layers to the font here, even though it is all the same color. Who knew a black and cream cover, in a sea of black and cream covers, could pop so much?

Set in 1940s Mexico, everything about this cover is evocative of that time and that place. There’s the stylized font, the vintage-looking girl on the cover, and the bright background that is slightly faded by age.

Though it might be historical, something about the image also feels extremely relatable to modern motherhood.

The joke throughout Lithgow’s book is that she’s going to become the so-called cat lady, so seeing a cat unraveling a thread from the top of the book through the title of the book is not only clever, it’s thematic.

The juxtaposition of pink, purple, white, and slightly-yellow (the cat) with the use of negative space works really well, too.

There aren’t enough nonfiction books doing really creative things with covers. Though there are a few on this list, they’re rare; rarer still are the clever covers done for nonfiction that isn’t memoir.

What works so well on this cover is that it describes exactly what the book is about: this is a story of how nature and fashion intersect. It makes sense to have just that be the focus of the design. We have our flower, we have artistic renderings of the petals of that flower–part of a larger work of art by Mexican artist Victoria Villasana–and they’re all connected to the thread that gives those petals color. The cover itself is nicely broken into three distinct pieces and in an unexpected manner.

Skulls! Snakes!

This cover could’ve left it at that and been fine. But those snakes and that skull have been made into ART.

Steidle uses color so well here, but my favorite part is how the pertinent information about the book, including its title, author, and a blurb, are woven around the main image. It’s a cover bursting with electricity.

Sea, Poison earns its best cover design honor for so many things. You would first not even know this were a book cover, as the placement of the title and author are not the focus. They’re in a printer beside what IS the main focus: our leopard. Just what is a creature representative of the wild doing beside a piece of technology representative of being chained indoors? That’s not to mention the great use of space here. If you think about the rule of thirds, it’s really clear here–our image isn’t until the bottom third of the design, creating a lot of interest for the eye.

All of the colors are used well, and I am really digging how many covers are re-thinking where and how they place blurbs. This one’s on one of the bonus sheets of paper from the printer and does not distract at all from what’s going on.

Pinks and purples are with us again, as is a vintage font for our title and author. That gray patterned sofa smack in the middle of the cover pops, and the mysterious hand covering the face (but not the eye!) of the person on the couch is begging readers to pick up the book for answers.

The grayscale image works really well because there is so much pattern and texture here. You don’t need to know how that couch feels because you instinctually know, just as you can imagine how the robe that the person lounging on the couch feels.