Museum of Accidents for Wave Books. I could never leave this project alone when I was working on it, and got a little carried away with the amount of comps I did. At least one of these ideas was recycled on another project buried in this blog. For more information on the final cover see my website.
Experimental treatments for State of the Union for Wave Books. I talked a bit about this title on my main website in reference to the final cover; trying to reach a solution to visualize the current political landscape (which has actually become much much worse since the publishing of this book a couple of years back) as more of a piece of artwork that has a deeply personal level to it rather than the usual considerations for broad-based demographics laid out by a marketing department. With Wave Books, the goal never had a mass appeal in mind, it was for a very select group of people who read poetry, and would most likely understand the need for a visual solution to read with as much subjective nature as the prose contained in the book.
On this title for Harvard Business Press that dealt with today’s unstable financial market, I was drawn to the idea of inflation as an abstract concept and dangerous idea with terrible consequences, which for some reason might have been inspired from watching Enduring Love at some point in the process.
Working with one of Green’s images he provided, and shadowy figure
I created from an old magazine image blurred to oblivion, this was a
pretty straightforward Photoshop job what went through several
permutations of color and texture before arriving at this solution.
Hollister Grant is a fairly new eBook client who first came to me
with this project that featured photos from her late husband.
Knowing how important and meaningful this project was for her
I did some research on the Library of Congress website and found
an actual battle map of Gettysburg that the client told me was
able to recognize landmarks from.
Second title I worked on for Mr. Harris, a biography of his experiences
during the atomic bomb testing in the Pacific Atolls. Once again I
consulted the Library of Congress treasure trove of public domain
images, and though I’m sure this one’s been used a million times,
it still has an immediate resonance as a powerful iconic image.
Final series for mystery writer Merry Jones. I was extremely pleased how quickly we were able to pull these together after nailing down the template. I’d find images to forward to the client for approval, and once we had the pace established, I think we finished the project in a couple of weeks from start to finish.
Final cover for The Opposable Mind that was ultimately rejected
at the last minute. Sometimes it’s just out of your hands.
Here’s the final cover I illustrated with Murphy’s concept, and I love when clients give me good ideas to work from. The white version was the original, but the Author wanted to add color later on thinking the background was washed out, and so red replaced it.
This is a title I did a couple of years ago I totally forgot about. I have absolutely no interest in Baseball, which is all the more of a challenge to make a book about it that generates enough enthusiasm so people will actually want to pick it up. That movement from Entropy to Action to Payment is what I believe is one of the primary motivating forces in the Universe. I think I lost or never got a print version of this…
Early comps for series of books for Philadelphia-based mystery writer Merry Jones. She had four titles for redesign and my proposal was to create a identity to tie the covers together using icons, color and image. Some of these samples explored abstract textures and image, and were definitely going more for a shock value the author had originally wanted to explore, but was ultimately abandoned for a template using a more simple palette of strong image and type.
Rarely do I get as tickled with a solution as I did with this, or for that
matter to actually use P22 Johnston Underground for the headline
type on the cover of a book that’s actually set in the UK.
