Werk.

It was at about this time last year that I started an in-house freelance job at HarperCollins, working on a specific yet large-scale project that involved dozens of reprints & repackages of Agatha Christie mysteries, which were to be marketed to a younger audience. While some of the titles would be adopting cover designs from the UK, they all needed a new, more consistently branded look, to be resized to fit Harper Paperback trim sizes, and quite a few of the books needed completely new designs/illustrations. It was a really wonderful experience—the Harper art department is full of some of the industry's most talented designers, and they're straight-up great people as well. Robin Bilardello was my brilliant art director/cheerleader throughout the whole process, and that experience alone was worth its weight in gold. Robin=the best. Here are a few of my favorite repackages:

These were all done in only a couple of weeks, as the deadline was reeeeaaaaaally tight to send them off to print. I finished these covers at the end of February, and they were printed and on bookstore shelves by mid-April. That's about one nanosecond in publishing time! Typically covers are designed about one year before they're scheduled to be published.

Speaking of working ahead of time, this is a cover that I designed/illustrated for Scholastic (whose Creative Director is the absolutely wonderful Elizabeth Parisi) at about this time last year, and it's not coming out until March 2012—nearly two years later:

That's all for now; hopefully I can put together a couple of process posts soon, since I've got mountains and mountains of comps for a few of my recent Penguin titles...