Little Brown held a competition to design a book cover for the 20th anniversary release of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. With my love for designing book covers (and David Foster Wallace), I had to make something great (see my main submission here). Unfortunately the contest only allowed one entry, so I had to throw out some options I liked. Here are two:
The background used the same liquify technique I used here. The cover I ended up submitting put it in the forefront. The “INFINITE” ended up unintentionally close to the Netflix’s 2014 logo.
I really like this one, but it felt too minimal-for-minimalism’s-sake, and I wanted to submit something that could actually win.
I spent some time sketching ideas for book covers, and you can see some ideas I was considering (and one that got made). I really like drawing with whiteboard markers—it’s very loose and paint-like yet temporary, even if you have to take crap phone pictures to get them on your computer:
