Over at The Huffington Post, artist Oliver Munday, who created the jacket illustration for The Mirage, talks about the design process. The article includes images of early, rejected versions of the cover, like the one at right.
I find this really fascinating. HarperCollins has been very good about keeping me in the loop on cover design, but when they made the decision to replace the “flipped cities” cover that appeared on the Mirage ARC, they were on a pretty tight timetable, so I never got to see any of these prototypes, only the final version. In hindsight, I’m very glad of that—one of the things I love about the finished jacket is that the evocation of the twin towers is so subtle, you may not even realize they’re there at first. But the trick only works if it hasn’t been spoiled for you.
(Thanks to Greg Delaney for the heads-up about the HuffPo article.)
Interesting article and thanks for posting it. Is this late change in the dust jacket the reason why the hard cover underneath was still in the green and magenta of the original design? Will subsequent printings be changed to match the colours of the new cover?
I was wondering about this myself, but haven’t had a chance to ask anybody in Harper’s design department. I do know they’re doing a second printing, so I’ll be very curious to see if the binding changes color — it’d be a cool way to distinguish the first editions.