According to the Financial Post, "The average skimmer who picks up a book spends eight seconds looking at the front jacket and fifteen seconds skimming the jacket." You can't judge - but you can sell - a book by its jacket. Here are several suggested book jacket design techniques that the great designers use:

The necessaries for your front jacket: The front jacket should provide your book title, subtitle, and author name. Potentially, and often missed are including blurbs and/or testimonials from important people.

Think of your jacket like a billboard. The best designs transmit the book's significance at a look, with simple, uncluttered design. Unique, distinctive, bold, colourful pictures work well. But keep the graphic style uniform with the content and personality of the book. Make sure there is a fundamental focal point to your design.

I recommend using bold, distinctive typography on the front jacket. When choosing colours, consider how thesecolours will look when transferred to black and white so your jacket will reproduce well in black and white ads, catalogues, and flyers. Also make sure the font you use for the title is legible from a distance and suitable for the book's subject.

Jackets that scream "layperson" and have a "do it yourself" look make it difficult to get rid of your book at all. If you lack ability in this field, seek the services of an experienced book jacket designer. A professional designer has the creativity, skills, software, access to stock photography, and printing knowledge that will make your jacket stand out above others in the marketplace.

What should you put on the spine of your book? Your name, title, and publishing company's logo show up on the spine. Make sure the information on the spine is clean, shipshape, and intelligible. I recommend using bold, complementary lettering on the spine as well.

Important items you should include on your back jacket. Place the category name in the upper left-hand corner to help stores and libraries shelve your book properly. Write a headline that clearly addresses who should buy the book. It should be followed by sales copy explaining what the book is about. Then provide a short bulleted list of benefits to skimmers.

I recommend including no more than three testimonials and endorsements, as well as your bio and photograph. Close to the bottom, put back copy in bold. Position the price in the lower left corner of the back jacket. Also include the 13-digit ISBN number for cataloguing and the bar code in the lower right corner (below ISBN number), which stores and libraries use for scanning information and price.

Don't forget to include recognition for your book jacket's artists, photog, and/or designer.

You now have a good impression of what makes a sound book jacket design. Remember, book jacket design is a form of casing-and good packaging attracts buyers to products. That's why successful companies corporations spend $1,000,000s researching the best product packaging possible.

Beginning in the late 1980's (and early 1990's), QuarkXpress and Adobe have tussled to see who would reign supreme and become the top choice in desktop publishing. In the 1980's Aldus Inc. had a desktop publishing program called PageMaker.

Aftewards, QuarkXpress Inc. released QuarkXPress, which become Aldus's main competition. Throughout this ongoing saga, QuarkXpress became victorious in the 1990's when PageMaker could not keep up with the competition.

In 1995, Aldus was bought out by Adobe, but PageMaker was not to become Adobe's main goal—they had their sights set elsewhere. They had other ideas up their sleeve. Since QuarkXpress become victorious, they slowed production of their software, and updates slowed too. Many years later, Adobe came to release InDesign, which was meant to be the "QuarkXpress Killer".

Adobe has made many successful applications. If it is for world wide web, or print they seem to have covered everything. Adobe InDesign adds to Adobe's high-end lineup of programs. Many who currently use other Adobe products, such as Photoshop, or Illustrator, will notice the similarity in interfaces. This makes it great for switching from one program to the next, because many of the tools are the same. A great example of this is that you cannot take an Adobe Photoshop file into QuarkXpress, but you can do this with Adobe InDesign.

Those who are working on switching from QuarkXpress to Adobe InDesign. however, have faced difficulties in adjusting to the new layout and manner by which things work. If you are a die-hard QuarkXpress user and you do not feel like giving Adobe InDesign an opportunity, then you might just want to recosnider that. 

Many users are changing over from QuarkXpress to Adobe InDesign because there is a need in the market for a solution that works. With Adobe dropping new products with great new features every couple of years, you will always be ahead. To be fair, QuarkXpress has been the industry standard for desktop publishing for a long time, and it is a great layout application. I guess it really all boils down to personal preference in the end.

Like PC vs. Mac, it comes down to how you like the feel about all the pros and cons.

With Adobe striving to do new and better things all the time, I feel Adobe InDesign is the best choice.

If you are someone that uses QuarkXpress, it is a good idea for you to take a look and get familiar with InDesign. This goes the same for Adobe Dobe InDesign users, learning a bit about QuarkXpress won't hurt you, it can only help you as you move forward.