First round of comps for this title. I was somewhat delighted as I snacked on a bag of White Cheddar Flavored Puffed Corn Snacks from Trader Joe’s that one of the package illustrations was the same Dover images I used on the cover on the right. This is hopefully the Meatgrinder’s last appearance on one of my covers.
I do quite a bit of work for Red Wheel Weiser, and enjoy the chance to work on the kinds of esoteric subject matter that they publish. These are some early rejected ideas, the most difficult part here finding appropriate subject matter for the cover. I turned to Flickr and found a trove of dated images from a Scandinavian museum before the client settled on an image I located through an amateur photographer in Europe.
Couple of comps for The Leadership Code for Harvard Business Press. Final version in all its glory can be seen on my website.
I’ve been wanting to do more illustration on my covers but most of my clients have similar definitive photographic or conservative cover solutions, and my stuff has to fit right or not at all. Murphy gave me the go-ahead to take a crack at his first eBook, and this first round split the difference. I ended up spending so much time on the bathtub slaughter that I ended up working some clippy solutions to go with the author’s concepts, which I might add if are good are totally welcome, and Murphy had some great ideas that were fun to fan out.
This project never really got off the ground properly. My early comps had an edginess the client had an extremely strong reaction, and I don’t mean positive. They clearly wanted a more feminine response and I was mostly likely the wrong person for this particular job. That said, I love these ideas and think in with a different marketing perspective the would have probably had a good chance of going somewhere.
My second title for Milkweed Editions was one of the most satisfying projects I worked on this year. Milkweed is one of the few clients I have who welcome conceptual covers, and here I was able to explore more abstract and ideas as well as working with archival images (my favorite kind) from the LOC. The final should be coming out in a month or so an I’ll be posting that to my regular website.
Comps for a Red Wheel Weiser redesign of The Food Revolution, John Robbins’ bestseller for sustainable eating and dietary health.
Red Wheel Weiser published one of the few books I know of that has a positive take on 2012. While half of these make direct reference to the ancient Mayan ruins of the title, I tend to favor the comps where I was exploring the concept of illuminated expansion in more abstract ideas.
This is the final version of for this cover for Red Wheel Weiser,
using a more straightforward photographic approach.
I’m really exposing myself with some of the stuff I did here. I think this book ties for the record of “Cover Attempts For A Book’ with something I did about 15 years ago called Scream Queens of the Dead Sea for Four Walls Eight Windows (now defunct) where I did something like 17 versions of the goddamn thing, only with them I was somewhat compelled to come up with this pile-of-poop, which was ridiculous since I had some really great ideas, really. I swear, if I find those comps I’ll post them, they’re probably on some Zip Drive disk or Syquest or something. Anyway, for Publish This Book, there were some good ideas here, funny ideas. No likey.
