Good illustrations sometimes work because they depict not the exact subject being discussed but a related concept that readers are likely to find more familiar. For example, Dan Kohan of Sensical Design writes in his newsletter about a book cover he recently designed for CASE, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. The topic: data mining for academic fundraising.
The book treats its subject seriously, with many graphs and text tables, but the baseball analogy let Sensical Design “have a bit of fun with the cover,” Dan says.
For example, the final design uses an old scorecard (Cubs 3, Reds 2) as a background element that suggests both baseball and data.
Dan quotes Lori Woehrle, the CASE Director of Book Publishing, who thinks the cover strikes “just the right balance of fun and sobriety, which matches the tone of the text exactly.”
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[...] the book’s contents. This means not just its subject matter, but its tone: see, for example, our earlier entry about a WBP award-winning cover designed by Dan [...]