Art that I am working on for a book the debunks the myth that China is buying the world.

John Bertram and Marco Sonzogni are publishing a book on Lolita covers and asked a slew of cover designers to contribute conceptual covers. Here is mine.

Final cover for this one with two preliminary sketches below. The brief was to convey "typographic man".

According to the brief it was important to convey the negative, destructive aspects of lying on society.

work in progress

I spent the afternoon looking through the Library of Congress's online collection of Civil War photographs. I must have looked at about 1000 before settling on this one. I kept going back though to the photograph of Lincoln's chair that he was sitting in when assassinated.

This was the first sketch I proposed for this cover. A book of the collected prefaces to the novels of Henry James.

work in progress

off to the printers

Baie de l’ours, Laurentians

6:00 A.M.

What is it with mason jars and book cover designers? This was from a while back.

New guide book in same series as the one below.

50/50

This one got into 50/50 this year.

A recent scholarly book. I extended the backdrop around the bricklayer to isolate the figure more - like an Irving Penn portrait.

We went in a different direction in the end but this was one of the initial sketches for this cover. It is a little stark for a trade book but I thought it was kind of fun.

Illustration for a cover I am working on about Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press. My intention was to have this letterform printed letterpress and photograph it for the final art.

What I really like about the final cover chosen for this non-fiction book is that it defies the clichés for the genre - open roads, big skies, dramatic scenery. I presented a couple of those as options, as you can see below, but in the end the choice was made to go for a more conceptual approach that gets to the heart of the story of an iron butt who rides his motorcycle non stop from Alaska to the Florida panhandle, averaging about 1500 miles a day. I wanted the cover to convey the obsessive nature of the quest, without necessarily showing the motorcycle. The author suggested having the odometer show the actual increases in mileage as day moved to night and back again.

This is a logo I am working on for a violin maker.

Forkhill Protestants, Forkhill Catholics

A social history of protestants and catholics in Forkhill parish on the Ulster borderlands between 1787 and 1858. The author contends that there was a greater degree of cooperation and exchange between Catholics and Protestants than the historical record has acknowledged. One house, two chimneys, both faiths.

Journals

I have done a couple of journal redesigns recently and love the challenge of showing "different but the same" as my old boss used to say. The treatment is based on the cover of XXe Siecle magazine from 1938 (below).

I was backing up some old covers and came across this one again. The biggest pitfall when doing scholarly books are those wordy titles and subtitles - how to manage all that type. I love it when they keep it to a minimum like this.

Blogger was having technical problems yesterday and this post got deleted.

One of my favourite presses is celebrating their 50th year. They were among my first clients and I have been doing their covers for the last 15 years - roughly 120 and counting. This is their current catalogue cover that I just designed.

This novel has lots of rock and roll references and deals with the tragic end of a friendship. I like the fact that a scratch on an album is like a memory that can’t be erased.

This is for a cover I am working on that is a diary but not in the typical autobiographical sense. The title reflects that in a tongue-in-cheek manner. I immediately thought of that iconic Magritte painting.

This is an illustration for a book cover I am working on. The photographs supplied were all black and white and the publisher wanted to jazz it up a bit.

Work in progress

Cover art for a scholarly book that deals with the problems that arise when Identity driven theories of group rights are relied on to settle legal claims.

Men’s Health Magazine

work in progress

This one was fun to work on. Poetry cover as boxing poster. The first one featured a heart but was off the mark. The poems are more about the poet boxing with herself.

Off to the printer.

This one went through a couple of options before getting it right. Written after a near-fatal medical emergency, the poems express gratitude at being alive but are also undercut by confusion and ambivalence with an acute sense of mortality.The "gift horse" is existence itself.

work in progress