boakes.org

ah, the joy of coming up with ideas for book covers. some time ago mark asked me to come up with an idea for his forthcoming book collaboration.

The original cover offered by the publisher was your run-of-the mill school book cover.

the target audience of this book is the postgrad who is looking for a broad introduction to the state of the art of Grid Computing. there’s a lot of hype surrounding “the g word” and the book aims to succinctly put everything in it’s place for the interested researcher without resorting to the damaging hyperbolic piffle which is surrounding the discipline today. so it’s more important to be able to recognize the cover than it is to discover it - with this in mind i’d created a cover based on fruit - very simple and memorable. picture the scene, practitioner a to practitioner b: “there’s a really good book, by mark baker, there’s a kind of grid on the front”, compared to, “there’s a really good book, by mark baker, you’ll know it , when you see it, it’s got fruit on the cover.”

after a little to-ing and fro-ing the publisher seemed to take this idea on board, but mark’s still not exactly overjoyed with the result.

the publishers never seemed to catch on to the fact that whoever it was they’d commissioned to do the real thing was a little over-keen to include

1. “a grid” on the cover - because people will associate grids with The Grid; right?
2. some traffic - because people will associate “gridlock” with The Grid, right?
3. a garish reddy pink, to get the book noticed…

which for anyone involved with grid computing on a professional research level is about as embarassing as the prime minister producing a manifesto with a picture of a man-in-a-vest-oh on the cover (it’s tempting to knock up this image but i’ll resist).

after remarkably little movement on the part of the publisher, over a fair amount of time, the book is all but finished and the cover is no better, so i’ve come up with a hybrid of the designs which fit into the standard Wiley cover spec.

The end result was that Wiley used a blue version of the red cover above, so the apple core idea got in, but the other fruits were neglected. A shame really because they entirely missed the point that the grid is made up of all kinds of different “fruits”, and that the book is an introduction to them all, describing their similarities and differences.