She’d been tasked with designing the book covers for the English translations of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part autobiographical novel, My Struggle—and she’d landed on a concept to tie the ...

Inspired by the “ flat design ” that’s become standard on the Web, these covers take on a minimalist style characterized by bright colors, simple layouts, and lots of white space.

The paperback cover, designed by Stephanie Ross, nods that way. Paperback “We think the paperback art is pretty funny, which the hardcover certainly is not,” says Helen Yentus, Riverhead’s ...