And what happens when there’s other people involved in the process, each of whom has their *own* take on the book, a take which fluctuates as wildly as your own? The answer is you chase even harder and you don’t look back. But what do you do when that picture seems to keep changing? The answer is, you keep chasing it. When you start a new project there’s generally two initial ways in: 1) you step into it and find a moment, a scene, an element and pin your cover design on that or 2) you step back and look at the overall picture – try and find the theme. The book is a melting pot of brain-warping ideas, every time you think you get a handle on what it is, what it means, it shifts in your hands like an organic Rubik’s cube.īooks which can manipulate reality aren’t easy to design covers for. When the incredibly talented and lovely Cath at Titan Books asked us to design the UK cover for Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross’ The Rapture of the Nerds we braced ourselves. If you’re lucky, like we are at Amazing15, you get to work with incredibly talented and lovely people, on some of the most fiendishly interesting projects you can’t even begin to imagine without the aid of viralised nootropics. Designer Martin Stiff was kind enough to share his notes on the process, along with all the proto covers he produced for the UK publisher, Titan Books:ĭesigning book covers is the best job in the goddamn world. But it turns out that producing that cover was quite a journey. I’m really impressed with the cover of the UK edition of Rapture of the Nerds, the novel I wrote with Charlie Stross. Ma/ Cory Doctorow / News, The Rapture of the Nerds How the amazing UK cover for Rapture of the Nerds came to be

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