Looking into existing What a Carve Up Book Covers

I then went onto looking at What a Carve Up book designs and surprisingly there aren't that much of a range of designs for this book which surprised me, but despite this i looked into the ones i found.

http://thejkreview.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/the-winshaw-legacy-or-what-a-carve-up-2/

This design above is the current book design at the moment and uses a photograph for its main imagery. The imagery has a woman which is one of the characters and i believe that the photograph is perhaps a scene from the story.  The colours from the photo give it an old classic black and white film look and contrast nicely with the rest of the book cover with the background being dark. So the visuals like the woman stand out a lot more making her one of the focal points of this cover. 

Another focal point is the typography. On this cover design the authors name is at the top in in big bold serif text. This is done to most likely catch people's eyes on who it was written by rather what book it is, which might be because he is a famous author and if people say his name on the cover with larger text it might catch more people's eyes in shops if they have red his previous books and would consider getting this one. The use of the colour strong pink of his name compliments the rest of the cover and makes it all that more bold and eye catching which is what the designer of the book cover wanted to achieve.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/193873.What_a_Carve_Up_

This is another design for the book and to me isn't that amazing and not eye catching at all and feels empty and ugly. To start with there is a lot of empty space which is what maybe the designer wanted but it still looks boring because of this and wouldn't make people want to buy this book by looking at the cover. The colours work well with the grey's and oranges which is a positive about the book cover. However the imagery is slightly dull as well despite it being related to the story. The imagery of someone just watching TV and has the back to the cover along with emptiness on the cover makes it look that much more dull and uninteresting. The typography is okay but the placement and size could've been adjusted so the title is more in the centre of the cover giving it more energy and appeal. The illustration style itself is another bad thing about this, its okay but since the imagery is boring it kind of makes the style of the imagery look unappealing as well.

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-NER-snc3svk/UbCqIWZsdhI/AAAAAAAABkg/I4hUmDLdJI4/s0/What%2BA%2BCarve%2BUp_JonathanCoe.jpg

Now this design above has more of an updated feel to it and looks a lot more visually appealing. It uses a lot of cutouts of images text from the news paper and imagery from a person placed together gives a collage feel to it but a cut up sticked together art feel to it as well which looks appealing and gives the overall image more to form, which may look slightly messy but is very eye catching and works really well. The colours are light but contrast well with the blacks which help to catch people's eyes in a store. The typography from the title blends in with the overall style which isn't bad and actually works with how the person was trying to design it. The authors name on the guys jacket gives it a type of name tag look that  a lot of people at work wear, so it a business look about it with not only that but the clothing that the guy is wearing.