Book Cover Is Done! High Stakes = Demanding Creative Process

Written by

Nancy Duarte

The first book cover design had near unanimous feedback that it looked too much like Seth Godin’s Tribes book:

Argh. We worked so hard on that cover and the creative process is so time consuming and demanding.

We HAD to go back to the drawing board since I’m a huge Godin fan, plus I didn’t want to hear “Your book looks like Seth’s” through the entire shelf life of the dang thing.

So Diandra, Erik, Ryan, and I holed away in the conference room drawing, cutting, mocking up many ideas. We were stuck on having a silhouette be part of the final solution so it would look like slide:ology. It’s really tough to have a human form that looks activated and engaged without looking like they are a whacked out concert-goer.

We created many mock-ups and ideas that hit the cutting room floor.

Below are the final three solutions:

This first option fits well with slide:ology as a family. Inspired by the crinkled paper form above, we wanted to make it look like a person was transforming through the static. This one got a ton of votes. Some passionate people felt it was the only possible choice since it had people in it. A handful of people thought it was either creepy and sci-fi, or spiritual. Our dogged attempt to include a silhouette on the cover actually ended up being a limiting factor. It is good to break away from that because there are only so many things a silhouette can convey. If we’d gone with a silhouette on this second cover, we’d HAVE to have a silhouette on the next book, too. And it was a struggle to find one that was meaningful.

More of the business-types and engineering purists liked Option 2. It’s simple and clean and most accurately represents the physical concept of resonance.

And last but not least… I collected feedback from Facebook, and the Twitterverse, and this is our winning option! Option 3 got the most votes and was clearly the favorite, with 200% more votes than the other two combined!

Thank YOU for your help in deciding the cover!