The melon song - poster
The pattern
This still is filed under Lettered cover hook.
Define
The cover is the hook, and the hook is lettering: a title treated as an image.
Mechanism
Type as bait. The words are drawn so they stop the hand before the contents are known.
Verdict
A journal, book, or issue must sell itself on a rack or a feed
Why it works
Attention is bought with an unsettling substitution: fruit where you expect fruit, faces where you do not, so the eye keeps returning to check what it just saw. The classical frame is doing the respectability work, letting a strange black-and-white picture sit on a parlour piano without looking cheap. Colour is rationed to two hits, the title and the single figure, which pulls the eye on a diagonal from the top of the page to the one person in the crowd who is dressed.
Steal this when
Use this frame-plus-oddity structure on a cover or thumbnail that has to look legitimate and still stop a scroll. Build a conventional, even formal, container and put one genuinely strange image inside it, then spend your single accent colour on the title and one focal point only.