This is the final cover on this one. Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that reptile skin figures in the plot. I wanted to find a way  of showing that without resorting to photography. My initial idea was to cut out a scale pattern to form the letters. Perhaps it was the bright primary colours but it had a “lego” quality at thumbnail size that was sending the wrong message. I opted for a graphic pattern for the full cover with the type superimposed.

56 Signal poetry covers and counting. Edited by the incomparable Carmine Starnino and published  by Véhicule Press. Here they are in order.

Final cover with preliminary sketch below. Conscious of the fact that there are so many covers featuring birds, including more than a few of mine, I wanted to find a way of showing it without showing it.

Final cover for this novel with preliminary sketches below. Sigismund Skrik is a hairdresser on a clipper ship sailing between Hamburg and New York.

Posters for “La Tempête” in downtown Montréal.

In most of my briefs for University Press covers, available reference material is included – usually in the form of illustrations from the manuscript. They are almost always in black and white. The challenge is always to find an interesting way of incorporating them, using layout and colour. For this cover the illustration below was supplied as possible cover material.

Three covers got into AAUP (American Association of University Presses) Book and Jacket show 2015

Paperback and cloth edition below.

3 Saints

I designed the logo for the town where I live. The street name font the signage company used is Highway Gothic B.

from the vault

Some of my genre fiction covers from last year or so.

The title of this novel refers to the famous ice storm that hit Quebec in January, 1998. In this remote part of Quebec where I live we were without power for 21 days in the dead of winter. This novel is a “huis clos” (no exit) where members of the same family are trapped in their Outremont home. 

I tried out different items and coated them in ice by periodically spraying water on them in my freezer - see bottom image. We settled on the toy car in the end. 

This is another avenue I explored where the icicles are like knifes pointing at each other to illustrate the tension within the family.