Digital native · 2016–present · North America, Western Europe, Global / networked
Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover (Cartoon Couple Cover)
Also known as Cartoon romance covers, Illustrated romance covers, Rom-com cover, Cartoonification of romance covers
The illustrated cover of the contemporary romantic comedy: a couple drawn as flat cartoon figures with simplified faces, from silhouettes and hidden faces to a few cartoon features, caught in one gesture that states the premise, on a single saturated ground of teal, pink, yellow or purple, under a hand-lettered title so large that the figures often lean on it. It recalls the drawn covers of 2000s chick lit. William Morrow's The Hating Game (2016) was an early example and Berkley took it up wholesale in 2018; by 2023, 72% of the romances featured in Publishers Weekly had illustrated covers.
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Use it with care
Draw the characters as the book describes them, in skin tone, body size, age, disability and gender, and do not lighten or slim them for the market: illustration spread partly because stock photography offered too few people of colour, and Helen Hoang chose it to get past readers' bias about her Asian lead. Because a cute cartoon cover does not show how explicit a book is and can be mistaken for young-adult fiction, say clearly on the book and in its retail listing that it is an adult romance. Critics have read the uniform look as sexist, making women's adult reading look like YA (Kelly Jensen, Book Riot, 2019), so draw this book's own premise rather than the template.
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How it works
- Replace the photographed clinch with a drawn couple: two flat, stylised figures with simplified faces (silhouettes, heads in profile or turned away, or a few cartoon features), dressed for the plot and shown at full or half length, so that the cover gives away nothing of how explicit the book is; the fewer the distinguishing features, the more easily readers picture themselves in the role.
- Set the figures on one flat, saturated ground that runs to every edge (teal, hot pink, sunny yellow, purple or navy), add two or three accent colours, and leave out texture, modelling and any setting beyond a prop or two.
- Make the title as large as the figures, usually larger: hand-letter it in tall condensed capitals or a bouncy brush script, often both together, and let the figures lean on it, stand on it or kiss in front of it (the couple on a square-root sign in The Kiss Quotient, the two young men leaning against RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE).
- State the premise with one gesture and one prop: back to back on suitcases, on beach towels seen from above, kissing over a stepladder, swiping on phones. Keep to that one idea and a few small hearts, stars or dotted lines.
- Treat an author's books as a matched set: the same illustrator, lettering and layout on every book, with a new ground colour for each title, so that the books read as a series on the shelf and in a photo feed.
US trade-paperback romance publishing in New York, with early examples such as William Morrow's cover for Sally Thorne's The Hating Game (2016), then Berkley (Penguin Random House), which put illustrated covers on its 2018 rom-coms, Jasmine Guillory's The Wedding Date and Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient among them; Forever, Avon, Gallery and St. Martin's Griffin followed. It recalls the drawn covers of 2000s chick lit (single shoes, shopping bags), to which Book Riot critics compared it in 2019. British and translated editions often reuse the US art (Corvus's 2018 Kiss Quotient; Spanish and Polish editions of Beach Read; the Dutch It Happened One Summer)
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Its design choices
From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.
- Layout & composition
- Space & hierarchy
- Typography
- Colour
- Surface & texture
- Imagery
- Medium & production
- Avoids
- Straight photography, Photomontage, Naturalistic depiction, Horror vacui, Abundant decoration, Photocopy & distress, Glitch, Experimental & distorted, Rebellious & subversive
Palette
#029daf#ef3e84#fdc104#7957a4#024c8b#ffffff
Typefaces
Tall, condensed hand-drawn capitals in white, stacked in two to four lines down the cover
medium-weight on Beach Read (2020), People We Meet on Vacation (2021) and Book Lovers (2022), thin and monoline on Twice in a Blue Moon (2019) and It Happened One Summer (2021); the 'big block text' The Pudding found on the style
Brush or monoline script for the title or the author's name
a large white brush script for the title of The Hating Game (2016), with A Novel in a yellow script, yellow on teal for The Kiss Quotient (2018), black with swashes and flourishes for The Wedding Date (2018), white around a block-capital word on The Right Swipe (2019), yellow for Tessa Bailey's name on It Happened One Summer
Heavy, bouncy display letters in two or three colours that the figures lean on
RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE, each word in its own colour on pink, 2019
Chunky, irregular hand-drawn sans letters in white that overlap the figures
Fix Her Up, 2019
Small sans-serif capitals for the author, 'a novel' and the cover quotes
HELEN HOANG in white on The Kiss Quotient; CASEY McQUISTON in red on Red, White & Royal Blue
Known for
Sally Thorne, The Hating Game (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2016), an early example with a 'similarly sleek cartoon cover' (Refinery29)
a woman in yellow and a man in a white shirt and yellow tie, cropped at half length in the two bottom corners of a teal ground, eye each other below the title in a large white brush script, with A Novel in yellow script and SALLY THORNE in black hand-drawn capitals
Jasmine Guillory, The Wedding Date (Berkley, January 2018)
black and white silhouettes in profile on a bright red ground, with the title in a flowing black script with swashes, hung with small drawn props: a champagne bottle, a cupcake, glasses and an aeroplane
Helen Hoang, The Kiss Quotient (Berkley, June 2018), a cover overseen by Penguin Random House associate art director Emily Osborne
a cartoon couple kisses on a square-root sign above faint chalk equations on teal, under a yellow brush-script title. Hoang asked for a fun illustrated cover to 'slip past unconscious bias' about her leads' race (The Pudding)
Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue (St. Martin's Griffin, 14 May 2019), cover art by Colleen Reinhart
two young men lean against a title in heavy display letters coloured red, white and blue on a pink ground
Avon's 2019 rom-coms
on Tessa Bailey's Fix Her Up a couple kisses over a yellow stepladder on purple, under chunky white hand-drawn letters; on Alisha Rai's The Right Swipe two figures hold phones in round vignettes on hot pink, with a white brush script wrapped around a heavy yellow RIGHT
Christina Lauren, Twice in a Blue Moon (Gallery Books, 2019)
two small white silhouettes sitting back to back on a gold crescent moon in a starry navy sky, under white condensed capitals
Emily Henry's Berkley novels Beach Read
(2020), People We Meet on Vacation (2021), Book Lovers (2022) and Happy Place (2023), covers shown in Sandra Chiu's portfolio: a new ground colour for each book (yellow for Beach Read, orange for People We Meet on Vacation, bright teal for Book Lovers), with the two leads seen from above on beach towels, lying on sun loungers or sitting back to back on suitcases, and the title in medium-weight white condensed capitals
Tessa Bailey, It Happened One Summer (Avon, July 2021), illustrated by Monika Roe according to a Washington College Review paper
two full-length figures frame white condensed capitals on navy, with a lighthouse between them and the author's name in a yellow script. The Dutch edition (Love Books, 2022) kept the art and added a 'Bekend van TikTok' (known from TikTok) roundel
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Make something in this style
Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover (Cartoon Couple Cover)’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.
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Where it comes from, and what it’s close to
Before it
The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.
After it
The styles that grew out of it.
No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.
Alike in its design choices
Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.
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Sources
- Elena Nicolaou, 'How These Instagrammable Book Covers Are Tricking People Into Reading Romance' (page title 'New Romance Book Covers Were Designed For Modern Women'), Refinery29 (11 October 2018): https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/10/213494/romance-novel-cover-trend-modern (The Wedding Date, January 2018, 'artful silhouettes on a bright red background'; The Kiss Quotient, Berkley, June 2018, a cartoon couple kissing on a mathematical symbol, cover overseen by PRH associate art director Emily Osborne; Berkley 'is not the imprint first to package a rom-com in a cover like this': The Hating Game, William Morrow, 2016, has a 'similarly sleek cartoon cover', and Berkley 'is committing to the trend wholeheartedly this year'; Good Luck Charm, Forever, August 2018; Berkley associate director of publicity Erin Galloway on covers no one would fear displaying in public)
- Alice Liang with Jan Diehm, 'What Does a Happily Ever After Look Like?', The Pudding (October 2023): https://pudding.cool/2023/10/romance-covers/ (over 1,400 romance covers announced in Publishers Weekly, 2011 to 2023; illustrated covers began replacing photorealistic lovers in 2018, rising from 18% in 2018 to 61% in 2022 and 72% in 2023; 'a colorful pop illustration with big block text'; 'Teal, pink, yellow, and purple make up the primary shades'; Helen Hoang 'asked for a fun illustrated cover' on The Kiss Quotient to 'slip past unconscious bias')
- Celeste Headlee and Kalyani Saxena, 'From chiseled abs to discrete illustrations: How romance covers have changed over time', Here & Now, WBUR (8 December 2023): https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2023/12/08/romance-novel-covers (interview with Alice Liang: the decline of the clinch, 'bright poppy visual color', a jump in racial diversity on covers in 2020)
- DW McKinney, 'New Trends in Romance Cover Design', Publishers Weekly (9 May 2025): https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20250512/97744-new-trends-in-romance-cover-design.html ('cartoonlike figures with only the suggestion of facial features against a solid, flat, brightly hued background'; minimal physical traits let a reader 'imagine herself in the love-interest role'; 'Just a few years ago, silhouettes, not too much detail, were the big trend'; Forever's Daniela Medina; Kiss Me, Maybe illustrated by Leni Kauffman; Here for a Good Time illustrated and designed by Vi-An Nguyen)
- Stephanie Nguyen, 'What Goes Into Illustrating a (Good) Romance Book Cover', New Romantics Book Club (18 April 2025): https://newromanticsbookclub.substack.com/p/what-makes-a-good-romance-book-cover (Berkley's Cindy Hwang: 'For more than five years, most romances have been published with illustrated covers'; early figures were 'impressions' of people, later art more detailed; illustrator Decue Wu on sketches, colour and refinement)
- Annika Barranti Klein, 'Trending: Illustrated Romance Covers, Romcoms', Book Riot (30 August 2019): https://bookriot.com/illustrated-rom-com-covers/ (Berkley, Avon, Simon & Schuster and St. Martin's Griffin titles; 'They look like the chick lit novels of 10–15 years ago', chick lit having had its 'heyday in the mid-aughts'; covers that suggest the contents 'without a clue about the heat level')
- Kelly Jensen, 'As Illustrated Covers Trend In Romance, What Is Being Said About Women's Interests?', Book Riot (20 August 2019): https://bookriot.com/2019/08/20/illustrated-romance-book-covers/ (the covers 'becoming nearly indistinguishable from YA book covers'; the trend 'suggests something else, too: sexism')
- Jessica Pryde, 'Illustrated Covers Aren't A Conspiracy to Belittle Readers', Book Riot (11 September 2019): https://bookriot.com/2019/09/11/illustrated-covers-arent-a-conspiracy-to-belittle-readers/ (cartoon covers 'merely a fraction of romance' in 2019; authors who could not find stock photos of the people they wanted turned to drawings; 'In the 2000s, "chick-lit" that was marketed towards romance readers had drawings of single shoes, or a shopping bag'; Jensen's argument summarised as 'infantilizing and sexist towards romance readers')
- Riley Dauber, 'The Popularity of Illustrated Cartoon Covers in the Contemporary Romance Genre', Washington College Review (1 May 2024): https://washcollreview.com/2024/05/01/the-popularity-of-illustrated-cartoon-covers-in-the-contemporary-romance-genre/ (a student paper: Emily Henry's covers by Sandra Chiu and Tessa Bailey's by Monika Roe, citing email correspondence with Roe: when she began, 'publishers didn't want faces shown on the covers' so 'readers could imagine themselves as the main character')
- Emily Gibbs, 'Judging a book by its cover? The cartoonification of romance book covers', The Boar (26 November 2024): https://theboar.org/2024/11/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-the-cartoonification-of-romance-book-covers (a British student view: 'two cartoon people on a simplistic colourful background'; mistaken for young-adult books)
- Wikipedia, 'Red, White & Royal Blue': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red,_White_%26_Royal_Blue (St. Martin's Griffin, 14 May 2019; cover artist Colleen Reinhart)
- Wikipedia, 'The Kiss Quotient': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_Quotient (Berkley Books, June 2018)
- Sandra Chiu, portfolio: https://www.sandrachiu.com/ (Beach Read, People We Meet on Vacation, Book Lovers and Happy Place, Berkley, 2020 to 2023)
- Covers examined on 19 October 2026 through Open Library (covers.openlibrary.org): US first editions of The Hating Game, The Wedding Date, The Kiss Quotient, Red, White & Royal Blue, Fix Her Up, The Right Swipe, Twice in a Blue Moon, Beach Read, People We Meet on Vacation, Book Lovers and It Happened One Summer, with the Corvus (UK) Kiss Quotient, the Planeta and Wydawnictwo Kobiece editions of Beach Read and the Love Books Een zomer vol verrassingen
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