I love looking at process posts on artist and designer blogs. Sometime in the last year or two a post on the Chronicle Books blog caught my attention. It was a post about the cover design process for an art book all about movie posters. The amount of covers that were produced for this title floored me. I liked so many of them. Even as a book designer myself (I’ve designed five complete art books amongst other small press projects), I’ve never approached the 28 or more cover designs that are on that post. Usually five to ten designs of varying uniqueness end up being produced as we hone in on the most successful cover.
Now I that I am being published by Chronicle Books and we are still working on the cover for my debut drawing book, Sasquatch’s Big Hairy Drawing Book, I am enjoying the process with the knowledge that their catalog of books always looks so great—and does so for a reason: the intense cover design wringer that their titles go through before being transmitted to print. Check out a bunch of rough sketched designs for my book above. Note that some are variations of each other and towards the bottom the book gets a new title! By the time this book lands on store shelves in fall 2011 I expect that I’ll have a few more designs to share.
McD Workshop 