Cover 💘 Love: The Safe Place by Anna Downes

This cover is a great example of how to create tension in graphic design.

The colors and the water caught my attention first. Water is my happy place, so to me it seemed the perfect fit for something called “The Safe Place.” The image of the pool and the view is a beautiful, calm one.

But there are subtleties on this cover that build tension while you look at it — and that’s why I selected it.

The words of the title, The Safe Place — they are partially underwater. And maybe I read too many psychological thrillers, but whenever I see a cover that suggests “safe”, I usually think it means the opposite.

When you combine it with the saying on the cover: “No Phones. No outsiders. No Escape.” something tugs, something feels not quite right with the beauty depicted here. At this point, I don’t know what it is — I haven’t read the description yet. But there’s a contrast here that keeps my attention and makes me want to know more.

If you think of a book cover as an ad (which it is), it’s sole job is to make the viewer pause, grab their attention, and want more information. This cover did the job of making me want to resolve that contrast, that tension of what should be a happy place but isn’t creating peace while I stare at it.

Let’s add the description to this. It starts with “Welcome to paradise…will you ever be able to leave?” That is a beautifully tense sentence. Run through the rest of the power words in this description and you see words like mess, lost, problem, perfect, remote, beautiful, enchanted, dangerous, secrets, consequences, deadly.

That’s exactly the experience I would expect to get when I open the pages. Cover well done.