I read I’ll Be There, but wasn’t able to read Sweetly, unfor­tu­nately, because of time constraints. 

A ton. Cov­ers are scru­ti­nized tremen­dously and these two were no excep­tion. For both cov­ers, I was given a pretty clear con­cept and direc­tion by the design team of what they were look­ing to achieve. Based on what they wanted, I was able to build upon that and expand on their idea, bring­ing some of my own sen­si­bil­i­ties and solu­tions to the cover.

Cov­ers start off in-house at the pub­lish­ers where the art direc­tor will con­cept out var­i­ous direc­tions (explor­ing pho­tog­ra­phy, illus­tra­tion, or typo­graph­i­cal treat­ments, for exam­ple). Once they’ve set­tled on a few ideas, they’ll try to get every­one else on board from sales and mar­ket­ing as well as the pub­lisher and VP and, of course, the edi­tor of the book and the pub­lish­ing house’s cre­ative direc­tor. Once a direc­tion is approved, the art or pho­tog­ra­phy is com­mis­sioned by the art direc­tor, who will then work with the illus­tra­tor or pho­tog­ra­pher to help shape the cover, see­ing mul­ti­ple rounds of sketches and, in some cases dif­fer­ent ver­sions of final art until every­one is happy. The art direc­tor will also set the typog­ra­phy for the cover (unless they’ve com­mis­sioned that as well) and, once it’s all approved, ship it to the printer.

For myself, as a free­lancer doing either design or illus­tra­tion (or in some cases both), I work pri­mar­ily with the design con­tact at the pub­lish­ing house who com­mis­sions me. That can be any­one from an art direc­tor or designer to the cre­ative direc­tor. I’ll also work with the edi­tors on con­cept­ing and mak­ing sure that we’re both happy and see­ing the same vision for the book. If I’m work­ing in-house, I’ll present those cov­ers myself at the cover meet­ings men­tioned above to the sales and mar­ket­ing folk. When I work from my own stu­dio, the cov­ers are usu­ally pre­sented by whomever my design con­tact is there and any feed­back that comes from those meet­ings gets fil­tered and relayed back to me by that person.

I do both jack­ets and inte­ri­ors, but not nec­es­sar­ily both for each book. It really depends on my role on that par­tic­u­lar book and whether or not it’s some­thing I’m inter­ested in or have time in my sched­ule for. When I work in-house, I usu­ally do everything.

What was the idea behind or what were try­ing to con­vey in the cov­ers I’ll Be There and Sweetly?

I’ll Be There focused on the rela­tion­ship between Sam and Rid­dle and, in par­tic­u­lar, called out a scene in the book where they were reas­sur­ing each other while stranded in the woods (though, it may have been changed a bit since I read an early draft). I wanted to get a sense of iso­la­tion and that it felt like these two char­ac­ters were the only ones alive in a great big world, which mir­rored their rela­tion­ship. Ear­lier in the process, the pub­lisher had thought about just focussing on the pickup truck alone on the high­way and I mocked up some con­cepts with that, but we all grav­i­tated more towards the two char­ac­ters once I brought that idea to the table and com­bined the two.

Sweetly was a play on Hansel and Gre­tel with the trees form­ing the face of a witch. We needed to con­vey a face on the cover because we wanted to  tie in the author’s pre­vi­ous book which had a sim­i­lar motif. 

Ink on paper, scanned in and then col­ored and messed around a bit in Pho­to­shop. Some­times I use Illus­tra­tor as well (Sweetly was done entirely in Illustrator). 

Every­thing starts with ideas. I like to explore a lot of ideas and then nar­row down and nar­row down until I get a few that I think really work. And then I’ll keep nar­row­ing down until I reach the one that feels like the win­ner. I like to draw as much from my head as pos­si­ble because I think it’s more iconic when you strip away need­less details, but some things really require the use of ref­er­ence, which I’ll use to help shape my images and give them authen­tic­ity as I build up my sketches. Even­tu­ally, once sketches are approved, I devi­ate from all the ref­er­ence and draw every­thing myself (and in some cases shoot my own ref­er­ence or new ref­er­ence) so that it feels organic and I’m not tied down to any par­tic­u­lar rep­re­sen­ta­tion. It’s pretty organic and every piece of art works dif­fer­ently depend­ing on what I’m try­ing to achieve with it.

Every­thing. I try to take all the expe­ri­ences I have and things I see (from gallery shows to just rid­ing the sub­way) and men­tally keep them on file. The best thing you can do for your­self if you want to have ideas and inspi­ra­tion is to live life and be present in it so that you’re mind­ful of the expe­ri­ences you’re hav­ing and they res­onate with you in mean­ing­ful ways.  

I majored in it in col­lege. It was some­thing I’d been want­ing to pur­sue since I was young.

Every detail of the book is thought about so, of course, the age range is impor­tant. It’s actu­ally a prob­lem for I’ll Be There because the pub­lisher and sales staff felt the cover was too young-looking so I believe it’s going to be repack­aged for paper­back (and then prob­a­bly for a hard­cover reprint), although don’t quote me on that. The biggest chal­lenge when design­ing a book cover is that there are so many peo­ple that need to approve it, you can get a case of too-many-cooks-in the-kitchen. It is an incred­i­bly hard task to please that many peo­ple over some­thing that is so subjective. Specifically, with book cov­ers, the chal­lenges as a designer are mak­ing sure the inter­play of type and art works well, the image is cap­ti­vat­ing, and the endur­ing prob­lem of try­ing to sum up an entire book in one defin­ing image. It’s not easy work, but when it’s suc­cess­ful, it is incred­i­bly rewarding.

Of course! Tons and tons and tons. My friends Chris Silas Neal (whose work was fea­tured on Cover Cor­ner in March) and Sam Weber have been doing amaz­ing work that I’m incred­i­bly jeal­ous of.There are a lot more, of course, but it’s a great task to even think about nar­row­ing them down or pick­ing out spe­cific ones.

All images cour­tesy of Neil Swaab. Click to view slideshow.

If you’d like to see more work by Neil, make sure to check out his web­site and blog. He also worked on the design for the cover of You Are My Only by Beth Kephart, among oth­ers. A big thank you to Neil for tak­ing the time to give us insight into your own work and all the work that goes into cre­at­ing a book cover design!