#canva is the devil

Not because I think the art style is bad, necessarily, but because I find the way these covers are constructed is more often than not profoundly lazy. Plastered wall to wall on TikTok and permeating the shelves of mass-market bookstores and airports alike, this cover art, while cute, communicates very little about what the book actually is about.

I can not tell if this book is a closed door romance or a smutty no-holds-barred work at all. I don’t even know the faintest thing about the characters from this cover, except maybe that there will be some grumpy-and-sunshine type dynamics at play. I am challenging myself to redo/alter canva-style romance covers in an attempt to make them feel less painfully generic and prove that it’s not actually difficult to use this art style in a way that is communicative and effective with minimal changes.

Here, all I did was shuffle the elements around a bit, bringing the main couple to the forefront of the image. I added a blood spatter to drive home the fact that this book does indeed contain a murder and some level of violence, but is overall a sweet and somewhat cutesy romance. I did find the pose of the couple a little bit stiff and lacking dynamic, so I messed with the lines of her body a little, gave her more of a rib cage, and brought her in closer to him on the whole.