COVER DESIGN: Pop Culture

I loved designing graphics for the jacket and case of Wonder Woman: Amazon. Hero. Icon. The primary colors, stars and stripes, and the modified Wonder Woman logo were all part of a design concept that extended throughout the interior in celebration of the funky exuberance of the character, her invisible jet, and lasso of truth. 

Limited by the imagery available that was licensed to use in the book Essential Horror Movies, and the directive that this was an overview of many films with iconic horrific characters, I manipulated some images to graphically enhance them and bring them up to print resolution, and had fun with a collage approach. The final jacket design included my own custom hand-lettering for the drippy HORROR text.

It is difficult to illustrate here, but the final cover design for Variety: An Illustrated History of the World From the Most Important Magazine in Hollywood had the photograph image on the board, and the dust jacket folded in half before wrapping around the lower part of the cover, invoking the tabloid magazine.

You know how limitations can often foster creativity? Well, one of the challenges of designing the cover to a book that you also wrote and illustrated is that the possibilities for cover art are endless, and you have to create the material itself to design with. These concept sketches for Sasquatch's Big Hairy Drawing Book were roughed in enough to discuss with the editorial and publishing team.

Loved worldwide, Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese: The Ballad of the Salt Sea was a graphically exciting comic book to design a new wraparound cover for. Leaning into the inky blacks of the linework, I selected fonts and designed shapes that evoked maritime feelings, at least in my head.

These examples of cover designs for The Joker, which was published in hardcover with dust jacket and softcover editions, have three different type treatments for the title, with two of them being hand-lettered.

The first five images here show some of the early design directions for Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror, which became a staple item sold at theme parks and to fans around the world. Because of this, I got to slightly update the final cover for two reprintings over the years.

The Science Fiction Universe . . . and Beyond project had me producing several rounds of concepts for the cover—this is only a selection. Hey, as long as everyone ended up happy in the end, I'm happy.