Art Director

I’ve learned so much about how to balance communicating my vision with trusting the artist to use his expertise.

Chris lives in the Philippines, so we communicate mostly by Trello. If you were to follow our (often epic) cards, one theme would stand out: iteration.

For my upcoming book, Unleash Your Awesome Memory, our initial mockups followed the “brain” and “tough guy” motifs of the top-selling books in the “Memory Improvement” genre:

But over time, I realized that women want to improve their memories too… and they buy far more books than men do. What if we tried appealing to those readers instead? Chris came up with some new designs.

I liked the “meditator” version best, so Chris went to work on further tweaks. Now we have a semi-final version, with some color schemes to test. Notice how he’s subtly brought back the iconic “brain” symbol.

Does this mean we’ll go with the cover I like best? Not a chance.

When it comes time to run cover tests, I’ll compare several of these covers, including the original “rocket” and “burst” versions, over days of competing ads. People do judge a book by its cover, in a split second. And I’m not the target for my books: readers are.

My first kids’ book that Chris illustrated was How to Talk to a Rock. When I first saw these spreads, I thought they were amazing.

He used a similar style for our next project, Julie and the Wishing Rock.

But as we moved on to further books, his style improved.

From The Trapped Mathbook:

From The Shopping Mall Dragon:

So I’ve had him go back and level up his earlier illustrations. It’s fascinating what a transformative change it is to improve the faces.

Chris does excellent work, and he always has infinite patience, whether I’m asking for a fresh redesign or honing in on the small details. I’m very, very lucky to have him on my team.

So are our clients. 😉