Book cover (Illustrator)
December 2004

This book is about the coming Social Security and retirement crisis in America, and it took a lot of cover ideas to arrive at this one. David Hoefferle, the author, wanted to convey the idea of a real disaster, we deliberated at length over how to balance a sense of impending doom and a respectable academic work. We didn't want to have an action movie cover advertising an economics book.

I'm happy with the end result: it can be read from across a room, is quite dramatic (especially compared to the average financial planning book), but not so cataclysmic-looking that it wouldn't be taken seriously.

We knew that getting an eye-catching book in the financial books section was easy - but it had to tell the truth, too.

That said, I'm not sure we picked the right cover. I had designed many covers for this book, and in retrospect I'm fairly sure that an earlier design would have appealed more to the patriotic sense of post-9/11 America. Still, this was the one that the client picked, and they were both good covers, so I'm not really losing sleep over the decision.