A Week in the Life of Our Design Team

Cover design looks, from the outside, like one good idea arriving fully formed — a designer has a flash of inspiration, and there's the cover. From the inside, in a typical week, it looks considerably less romantic and considerably more like research.

Monday and Tuesday are usually reading and reference-gathering — not just the manuscript, but the genre's actual shelf, current and historical, so a new cover knows what it's standing next to. We pull twenty to thirty comparable covers before sketching anything, partly to find what's overused and partly to find what's missing.

Wednesday is concepting — usually three to five genuinely different directions, not three versions of the same idea with different colors. By Thursday we've internally narrowed to one or two directions worth showing the author, and Friday is typically revisions on whichever direction got traction, plus typesetting work on whatever interior layouts are mid-process.

The part that surprises people most: a cover that looks instantly obvious in the final file usually went through four or five discarded directions to get there. The "obvious" choice is almost never the first one anyone had.