Cover Fun!

Thanks for all the great compliments that many of you have been sending me about the cover of the book. The final version of the cover is essentially the one you’ve seen before (it is on the MIT Press website here, and you can currently pre-order at amazon and other booksellers the world over – for example here), but the blue is a bit lighter (some people at the publisher were concerned that the figures were a little too subtle and wanted them much brighter, I did not want them to light so that they’d get lost in the lettering…so we compromised). Click the image to see a sightly larger version.

For those of you who want a deeper dive into the background of all this, I thought I’d share the sketches I made back in early April when they asked me to design the cover. (Click for larger view.)

It is always good to explore options, and also to give design options when asked to design something… I was secretly hoping they’d choose my favourite one and they did. I did not submit the middle one since I grew cold on it when I discovered that there was another book out there that had a similar idea (two upright people facing each other in dialogue) and also because I did not like the way I’d have to flow the lettering.

The other reason the first one was my favourite is that I could see the germ of a nice solution to another problem. I did not want my book to be one of those graphic books that has “a graphic book” somewhere on the cover to inform (“warn”?) the reader that it is a graphic book, as you often see. I wanted the cover to tell this without doing it in so many words. My speech bubble idea in the middle seemed too clunky. The circle of the table on the other hand was perfect. I could do a montage of a few images from within the book and put them there, also supplying a focus and a main splash colour for the overall design. I was so excited about this solution that I almost could not wait to get started! And indeed, they agreed with what I was trying to do and so I quickly worked up the final art that you see at the top. (See this earlier post for how I did the stars.)

To find out more about the book, go to the pre-ordering sites (and don’t be shy about pre-ordering! :)) and read the synopsis… And click here to see a lot more about the development of the book.

Amazon (USA) (Or your Amazon in your country if not USA.)
Barnes and Noble

(Lots of independent booksellers soon, and the book will physically be on shelves this Fall: October 20th 2017)

-cvj